GenZedong

The war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza are not separate conflicts. They are parallel theaters of the same civilizational confrontation: East vs. West. In both, a militarized ethno-state backed by the West targets an Eastern people whose only crime is refusing to vanish.

In Donbass, it was the people who resisted the Maidan coup, who refused to bow to a NATO-aligned regime built on racialized nationalism and historical amnesia. In Gaza, it is the people who refuse to surrender their land, their dignity, and their right to exist to a Western-backed settler state that sees them as demographic threats. Since 2014, both have been bombed, blockaded, starved, and slandered, framed as terrorists for daring to survive.

The West calls this order. But it’s an order built on siege.

Those who insist that Russia is secretly aligned with Israel misunderstand both history and the present moment. Russia may be cautious, even shifting in some diplomatic arenas, but it has not embraced the West’s logic of annihilation. It has not signed onto the project of fortress ethno-states wielding AI-powered drones against refugee camps or school basements. On the contrary, Russia stands, with all its contradictions, as a major brake on that world order.

If Israel is Ukraine, then Gaza is Donbass: two peoples on the wrong side of the Western empire, trapped behind barbed wire and digital crosshairs. And if Russia is anything in this equation, it may be what Iran is to Gaza, an imperfect ally, vilified for even daring to intervene.

These are not isolated wars. They are fronts in the same global conflict: a West that seeks to erase history, borders, and peoples, and an East that refuses to disappear. The propaganda may differ. The drones may evolve. But the battle lines are drawn.

From Donbass to Gaza, every empire meets its end.

From Bandera to Ben-Gurion, echoes of ethno-nationalist revival resonate in the modern trajectories of Ukraine and Israel, two states forged through war, hardened by siege mentalities, and fueled by historical narratives of existential struggle. But these similarities are no accident of parallel development. They reflect a deepening alignment shaped by shared adversaries like Russia and Iran, backed and brokered by the same Western patrons.

In 2022, an officer of Ukraine’s Azov Regiment, toured Israel after surviving the siege of Mariupol. By 2025, Israeli drones were flying missions over Rafah, while American-made PSRL-1 rocket launchers, initially supplied to Ukraine, were spotted in conflict zones across the Middle East. Some experts suggest these may have reached Gaza through black-market channels, though a direct transfer remains unproven. What is undeniable, however, is the convergence of military technologies, intelligence doctrines, and battlefield logistics spanning both theaters.

In April 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, himself a stalwart ally to the Zionist cause, declared that he envisioned Ukraine becoming “a big Israel.” In doing so, he abandoned the pretense of liberal reform and embraced a future defined by permanent militarization, domestic surveillance, and an ideologically mobilized citizenry. Ukraine, he suggested, would survive not by joining Europe’s post-national dream, only by imitating the ethos of a heavily securitized Middle Eastern state.

Zelenskyy’s statement didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It followed decades of quietly intensifying Ukrainian–Israeli ties, in historical memory, military cooperation, tech integration, and shared narratives of victimhood. But it also exposed a deeper and more disturbing fusion. When the president of a country still reckoning with the legacy of the Holocaust and its own fascist collaborators calls for the building of a “Big Israel,” he is not just invoking a model of defense, he is invoking a model of justified violence, permanent siege, and a long tradition of selective memory, one that both Ukraine and Israel have wielded to reconcile uncomfortable historical alliances of culpability.

Just as the OUN’s collaboration with Nazi Germany is selectively reframed within the Ukrainian national mythos, Israel’s founding story often omits its own moments of strategic accommodation with fascism. In the 1930s and ’40s, elements of the Zionist movement, most notably the Haavara Agreement between Nazi Germany and the Jewish Agency, facilitated Jewish emigration to Palestine while bypassing international boycotts of the Nazi regime. Revisionist factions like Lehi (the Stern Gang) and Irgun Zvai Leumi even sought military cooperation with the Axis powers against the British. These uncomfortable truths, long buried beneath the moral absolutism of Holocaust remembrance, underscore a shared willingness, Ukrainian and Zionist alike, to collaborate with and even become genocidal regimes when national aspirations were at stake.