US Official Sheepishly Scrubs Social Media Photo Featuring WWII Ukrainian Fascist After Criticism

Paul Massaro, a policy advisor at a Washington-based federal agency, got in hot water online after tweeting a selfie of himself wearing a military patch featuring Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian fascist leader who collaborated with the Nazis, and whose militias were responsible for the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Jews, Russians and Ukrainian anti-fascist partisans during the Second World War.

“Hey, look what I’ve got,” Massaro wrote in a tweet, accompanying a photo of himself grinning while wearing the patch. The shoulder sleeve insignia bears Bandera’s face, and the text ‘Ukraine is our mother, Bandera is our father’, the refrain of a popular neo-Nazi anthem which went viral among Ukrainian ultranationalists in 2019, and used commemorate Bandera and his Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainian acronym UPA) fighters.

Several hours after posting the tweet, Massaro scrubbed it, replacing it with the message “Deleted at the request of a good Polish friend. God bless Polish-Ukrainian friendship and may it remain strong forever.”

The bureaucrat did not elaborate on what his “good Polish friend” told him about Bandera. Presumably, it may have had something to do with the fact that Bandera’s militias murdered up to 200,000 Polish civilians in western Ukraine between 1943 and 1945.

This isn’t the first time Massaro, whose formal job title is ‘senior policy advisor’ at the US Helsinki Commission, but whose job description seems to be centered around tweeting anti-Russia hate speech all day and going on podcasts to explain how every government that challenges US global hegemony must be overthrown, has gotten into trouble over a neo-Nazi-themed photo. Last week, he posted a photo of himself standing with a signed banner of the Azov Regiment* – an openly neo-Nazi militia responsible for war crimes against Donbass civilians, Russian troops and even Ukrainian conscripts.

Massaro took heavy flak over the patch, with followers accusing him of displaying “love for Nazi collaborators” and calling him out for effectively “wearing attire celebrating the Holocaust.”

“Nah fam it don’t work like that. You knew exactly what you were doing,” one person quipped, posting a screengrab of his deleted pic. “As Polish immigrant I’m deeply disgusted by people like you, ignorant fools who don’t know history, keep peddling propaganda and support Nazis,” another wrote. "When do they ship you the Adolph Hitler patch?” another joked. “Why did you delete your photo with the bandera patch? Do you hate Ukraine?” a fourth sarcastically wrote.

Users continued to hound Massaro in his subsequent tweets, refusing to forgive his Bandera patch ‘fashion faux pas’, and posting a photoshopped image of a young Bandera wearing a Massaro patch.