2019-20: 'Zelensky has a choice'
How the Banderites helped sabotage Zelensky's peace agenda
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Part 1: Bandera’s ‘Insurgency-in-Waiting’
Part 2: Marketing the ‘Resistance Movement’
Ten days before 73% of voters in Ukraine cast their ballots for Volodymyr Zelensky in the spring of 2019, as Banderites and allied far-right nationalists initiated their “Protect Ukraine” campaign against Zelensky, which later became the “Capitulation Resistance Movement,” distinguished “experts” and politicians (including Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, on his way to earn less than 25% of votes) got together for the annual Kyiv Security Forum.
It seems safe to speculate that Zelensky, a comedian who campaigned on ending the war in eastern Ukraine, was not popular among the event goers. This high-level forum is organized by former prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s Open Ukraine Foundation, which has partnered with the Atlantic Council, an influential U.S. think tank funded by NATO, Washington, and others. “Yats is the guy” who led an IMF-subservient “kamikaze” government and the unpopular “People’s Front” party that welcomed prominent OUN-B members and other far-right nationalists.
Mykhailo Basarab, a Senior Fellow of the Kyiv Security Forum who spoke at the 2019 event, later joined the Coordination Council of the “Capitulation Resistance Movement.” That summer, Basarab speculated on Poroshenko’s Channel 5 that Zelensky’s presidency was a “Russian special operation.” Danylo Lubkivsky, the director of the Kyiv Security Forum and a board member of the Open Ukraine Foundation, joined the advisory “Strategic Council” of the “Resistance Movement.”
Zelensky dissolved parliament to hold early elections in July 2019. His “Servant of the People” party won an outright majority. Earlier that month, the new Ukrainian president visited Canada, where he was grilled by leaders of the Ukrainian Canadian community aligned with his nationalist opposition in Ukraine. According to Roman Medyk, president of the League of Ukrainian Canadians (a Banderite “facade structure” dating back to the 1940s), “I attended the meeting and had the opportunity to ask the first questions of the new president.”
The Institute of National Remembrance is considered to be the leading state institution for the further development of Ukraine as a political nation. The director of the institute is Volodymyr Viatrovych. Do you support the work of the Institute and its leader?
Readers of the Bandera Lobby Blog probably know by now that Viatrovych, “The Historian Whitewashing Ukraine’s Past,” is an important OUN-B member. The new Ukrainian government fired him a couple months later. Writing about Zelensky’s visit to Canada, Medyk claimed that “the entire Ukrainian diaspora support[s] the position of leading Ukrainian MPs, including Andriy Levus, on national security issues.” Levus, as deputy OUN-B chairman and former deputy chief of the Ukrainian Security Service, appears to have led the “Resistance Movement” from the start.
It was at that summer’s Ukraine Reform Conference in Toronto that Donald Trump’s Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations pulled aside Volodymyr Zelensky and his chief of staff to warn them about “the Giuliani factor,” by which “he meant ‘a negative narrative about Ukraine’ that was ‘being amplified by Rudy Giuliani’ and was unfavorably impacting ‘Ukraine’s image in the United States and our ability to advance the bilateral relationship’,” according to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s “Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report.”
“Ukraine tried to take me down. I’m not fucking interested in helping them,” Donald Trump allegedly said to the U.S. delegation that attended Volodymyr Zelensky’s inauguration. That summer, the Trump administration tried to make Zelensky announce an investigation of the Biden family, first in exchange for a coveted invitation to Washington, before withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military assistance.
“I think he [Zelensky]’s going to make a deal with President Putin, and he will be invited to the White House,” Trump told the press in August. “He is a reasonable guy. He wants to see peace in Ukraine.” The following month, Trump offered to join peace talks moderated by France and Germany, and Zelensky agreed to discuss the “Steinmeier Formula,” a simplified version of the Minsk agreements, to resolve the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
“We will not allow surrender!” declared “Protect Ukraine.” The signatories of this open statement to Zelensky, making maximalist demands and implicitly threatening to launch a radical protest movement against him, represented a Banderite-brokered coalition of far-right nationalists and pro-western hardliners representing the “25%” that voted for Poroshenko.
Possibly inspired by events in Washington, an anonymous Ukrainian American submitted a sensational whistleblower complaint to the New York State Attorney General’s Charities Bureau about the OUN-B network in the United States. “Godspeed and hope all of us survive this insanity (or possible FSB op)!!” the Ukrainian American OUN-B leader emailed his associates. Actually, the timing had nothing to do with the unfolding Trump-Ukraine scandal, and everything to do with the OUN-B organizing a hostile takeover of its oldest front group in the United States—what the old board of directors called a “coup d’etat.”
The “Capitulation Resistance Movement” (Rukh Oporu Kapitulyatsiyi, ROK) kicked off in early October to sabotage Zelensky’s peace agenda. “If you attempt to implement any of the capitulatory formulas through parliament,” organizers warned, “our protests will cease to be peaceful.”
According to the Eurasia Center of the Atlantic Council, a partner of the Kyiv Security Forum, the ROK was “a democratic movement made up of distinguished diplomats and experts,” rather than an undemocratic nationalist campaign with the OUN-B pulling the strings. A year later at the 2020 Kyiv Security Forum, roughly two weeks before Election Day in the United States, the director of the Eurasia Center confidently said, “at the end of the day, Zelensky has a choice. He can bow down to Kremlin dictates, or he can pursue policies which ensure Western support, and when it’s that choice, the decision, I think, is almost inevitable.”
The news broke on October 1, 2019 that Kyiv agreed to the so-called Steinmeier Formula. Despite Zelensky’s assurance that “not a single red line will be crossed,” the (mostly Banderite-hijacked) Ukrainian diaspora organizations presented a united front to “warn President Zelenskyy about crossing red lines.”
OUN-B member Roman Medyk already said the quiet part out loud, or at least hinted at it: “the entire Ukrainian diaspora support[s]…Andriy Levus.” After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Levus and the ROK announced that he’s leading the “Resistance Movement” as the OUN-B’s second in command.
The Banderite president of the Ukrainian World Congress warned Zelensky that crossing any red lines “will have grave consequences for his presidency.” The Ukrainian Canadian Congress leader (who is unaffiliated with OUN-B) claimed, “Many citizens of Ukraine and Ukrainians abroad are very troubled by President Zelenskyy’s concession to Russian conditions to hold a summit meeting.”
The Banderite puppet president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America also warned, “There are red lines that President Zelenskyy must not cross.” The international OUN-B leader added, as co-chairman of the Australian Federation of Ukrainian Organizations, “The red lines on many issues including this have been drawn… Giving into Russia will be deserting the values and principles of 14,000 solders and civilians who have died in the war.”
Good cops, meet bad cops.
On the first night of October, the (neo-Nazi) Azov movement organized a “No Capitulation” protest outside the Office of the President. Azov’s National Corps soon brokered a far-right “Resistance to Capitulation” coalition in Kharkiv, and “Protect Ukraine” prepared to relaunch as the “Capitulation Resistance Movement” on October 6. Several thousand people rallied that day in Kyiv. Azov supported the ROK event while making plans to lead a bigger “No Capitulation” protest on October 14. The ROK issued an ultimatum, warning Zelensky that he would have to resign if red lines are crossed.
Mr President you have until October 14… If our demands aren’t met we will take to streets in much larger numbers… If you attempt to implement any of the capitulatory formulas through parliament… our protests will cease to be peaceful.
A couple days later, Azov formed another regional headquarters in eastern Ukraine for the far-right “resistance to pro-Russian revanche.” This time, Poroshenko’s “European Solidarity” party signed on. “Right turn of Poroshenko’s party & alignment w/ hard right-wing groups among most interesting devs [developments] in Ukraine,” tweeted the Freedom House project director in Ukraine.
Recall that “Free People,” the OUN-B front that spearheaded the Capitulation Resistance Movement, joined forces with European Solidarity during the 2019 elections. Furthermore, Banderite ROK coordinator Andriy Levus is a longtime assistant to Andriy Parubiy, a far-right leader of European Solidarity and essentially a founding father of independent Ukraine’s neo-Nazi movement. Levus was ranked #29 on the European Solidarity party list for the parliamentary elections, but Poroshenko’s party tanked, so he lost his seat in the Verkhovna Rada.
“I’ve known Michael Carpenter for a long time,” Levus said on October 11. Carpenter, a foreign policy advisor to former vice president Joe Biden, was at that point also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and the managing director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. The day before, Carpenter spoke at a conference organized by the U.S. leader of OUN-B, and so did an ROK advisor. Mike Carpenter himself sounded like one, and described the Steinmeier Formula as “the primary threat to Ukraine internally right now.”
Thousands more rallied in Kyiv on October 14, this time led by the National Corps, which sent veterans to Zolote, a frontline town in eastern Ukraine, to “protect the village in case of withdrawal of troops.” The ROK, now in a supporting role, according to journalist Oleksiy Kuzmenko warned of the “political collapse of the government” and a “social explosion that will sweep them away” if Zelensky agreed to “peace at the expense of Ukraine.”
That month, the late Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen argued that because of this (growing) “quasi-fascist movement,” “unless the White House encourages this diplomacy, Zelensky has no chance of negotiating an end to the war. So the stakes are enormously high.” A year later, with the ROK agitating for regime change, Michael Carpenter made the closing speech at the 2020 Kyiv Security Forum, and said that “we are at a crucial crossroads,” describing Ukraine as “ground zero” for a “clash” between “liberal democracy” and “authoritarian oligarchy.”
OUN-B members from around the world traveled to Munich in mid-October 2019 for the 65th anniversary of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera’s assassination by the KGB. The delegation from Ukraine included deputy OUN-B leaders Andriy Levus and Oleh Medunytsia, political education chief of the far-right Svoboda party Yuriy Syrotiuk, former education minister Serhiy Kvit, and the leadership of OUN-B’s Youth Nationalist Congress (Molodizhnyy Natsionalistychnyy Konhres, MNK), which created “Free People.” Levus and Kvit, respectively, most likely chaired the Coordination Council and Strategic Council of the Capitulation Resistance Movement.
Michael Carpenter’s Facebook friend Solomiya Farion was there, who co-authored the MNK’s “Insurgent Vertep,” or 1940s Banderite-themed antisemitic Christmas play, and now directs the “OUN Fund,” also known as the OUN-B’s “Defense of Ukraine Fund.” Also present was Serhiy Repik, a member of the ROK Coordination Council who succeeded Farion as the MNK leader in 2021. Repik has helped build bridges for the MNK to Italian neo-fascists (CasaPound) and Ukrainian neo-Nazis (C14).
Dmitry Shved, the MNK coordinator in Kyiv (now a member of the secretariat), with a Nazi tattoo on his elbow, carried a wreath on behalf of the OUN-B leadership. Vasyl Kapustynskyj, an MNK board member who resembled a Hitler Youth poster boy, made the opening remarks at the gravesite and apparently emceed the private event that followed. Earlier this year, Kapustynskyj became one of the relatively few OUN-B members known to have died in the war.
Later that month, Volodymyr Zelensky visited the frontline town of Zolote in eastern Ukraine to confront a checkpoint recently established by Azov fighters and veterans who “said they would do everything to stop the [minor] pullback” ordered by Kyiv to advance peace negotiations. The Moscow correspondent for The Independent said the incident marked “the end of President Zelensky’s honeymoon.”
Zelensky was caught on video getting upset with a veteran and representative of Azov’s National Corps in Zolote. “You want to formalize relations with me?” he asked incredulously. “What capitulation? What are you saying?”
I came and said, guys, pull back the weapons, and you are trying to shift the conversation… You can’t voice any ultimatums to me, you don’t understand… Should we go in and take the weapons or what? I will end this conversation… Listen, Denys, I’m the president of this country. I’m 41 years old. I’m not a loser. I came to you and told you: remove the weapons. Don’t shift the conversation to some protests.
Azov movement leader Andriy Biletsky threatened to escalate the situation in Zolote. “There will be thousands there instead of several dozen.” Instead, Azov capitulated, and removed their weapons from the frontline town. “Mr. President thinks he is immortal,” raged Sofia Fedyna, a singer and top-ranked member of European Solidarity in parliament. “A grenade may explode there, by chance. And it would be nicest if this happened during Moscow’s shelling when someone comes to the front line wearing a white or blue shirt.”
Fedyna was eventually charged with threatening the life of the president. Fedyna, who would later sing “Our father is Bandera” with OUN-B member Volodymyr Viatrovych and other European Solidarity lawmakers, reacted to the news thusly: “Today, in fact, I am being incriminated for a trumped-up crime, which means that we are sliding downhill into a mass concentration camp.”
Two days after the incident in Zolote, the ROK, or “CRM,” marketing itself as the respectable face of the (Azov-led) “No Capitulation” movement, published an English language note on Facebook: “Information for our foreign partners.”
The Capitulation Resistance Movement (CRM) is a broad-based, non-partisan, peaceful and law-abiding nationwide civic campaign. Its raison d’etre is to alert President Zelensky and the Ukrainian government to widespread concern of the Ukrainian citizenry that the peace proposals currently under consideration are fatally flawed… CRM is not a monolith. CRM unites under its banner a far-reaching coalition of individual citizens, civic organizations and political parties… We have asked and our supporters have complied with our request that their affiliations not be displayed and advocacy for their agendas be deferred while the nation addresses the one overriding concern that unites us all, that President Zelensky must be dissuaded from his current path to capitulation through appeasement of the aggressor – Russia…
Therefore, through its advocacy program, the CRM is making clear to President Zelensky and the government, that the terms and conditions currently under consideration whether they are referred to as the Steinmeier Formula or something else will not lead to peace. Appeasing the aggressor will forestall a genuine and just peace and lead to even greater bloodshed. A fake peace achieved through undermining Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity is – capitulation. Just as Russia’s dictator, Putin, failed in his aggression, so too, his fake promises of peace will again fail to break the will of the Ukrainian people to live free from Russian hegemony by resisting Russian aggression whatever its hybrid form.
“As for the leadership of CRM…” the note did not mention the (executive) Coordination Council, but only the (advisory) Strategic Council. By 2020, the latter consisted of at least eight people, among them the director of the Kyiv Security Forum. Serhiy Kvit, the far-right former Education Minister of Ukraine (2014-16) and a member of the OUN-B leadership, likely chaired the Strategic Council.
In its October 2019 note for “foreign partners,” the “CRM” named 17 members of the Strategic Council, with most of the additional names coming from the Coordination Council. There were apparently two exceptions, but then again, the “Resistance Movement” suggested there were additional unnamed Council members.
Ulana Suprun, a Banderite from the Detroit area, served as the acting Healthcare Minister of Ukraine (2016-19). It’s unclear what role she actually played in the “Resistance Movement.” Zelensky’s government dismissed her in September. From at least 2014-17, Suprun lived in a Kyiv apartment owned by Christina Pendzola, treasurer of the Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation (UAFF), who may have inherited the dwelling from her late husband, a leader of the far-right UNA-UNSO in Ukraine. The UAFF owns 40% of the OUN-B headquarters building in Kyiv, which shares an address with Suprun’s “Patriot Defense” initiative. The 2019 Banderite whistleblower complaint was titled, “UAFF Inc - Large Scare Fraudulent Financial Activities - Fascist Organization - Underground Paramilitary Training Activities .”
Andriy Denysenko, the ROK coordinator in Dnipro, is a former regional leader of Right Sector and Svoboda. He has at least half a dozen different articles of clothing from the neo-Nazi brand SvaStone. Earlier in October 2019, Denysenko said about Zelensky, “I want to ask him to say hello to Ceausescu and Gaddafi.” Over the following year, Denysenko repeatedly made similar threats. “If Ze does not stop, the fate of Gaddafi and Ceausescu awaits him,” Denysenko posted in July 2020, and declared at a protest against Zelensky’s government, “Let them know that they will not reach Rostov,” where the former president Viktor Yanukovych has lived in exile in Russia since he fled Ukraine in 2014. “They will hang on stilts, lanterns, and repeat the fate of Gaddafi and Ceausescu.”
The Strategic Council drafted its “Ukrainian Doctrine of Security and Peace” in early November 2019, ostensibly as an alternative to the Minsk agreements, which the ROK leadership dismissed as illegitimate. The “Resistance Movement” subsequently held a “National Forum of Dignity,” harkening back to the so-called “Revolution of Dignity” that began with protests on November 21, 2013. Opening remarks were delivered by Ihor Mazur, a leader of the far-right UNA-UNSO, and Borys Potapenko from Warren, Michigan, who chairs the “International Council in Support of Ukraine” (ICSU), or global coordinating body of OUN-B “facade structures.”
“There’s a broad-based ‘No Capitulation’ campaign underway now, involving many different groups, such as parties including European Solidarity, Democratic Axe, National Corps, and ROK, which is a platform that broadly encompasses the civil society sector,” said Andriy Levus, who also spoke at the ROK forum, and told the Ukrainian Week, “We’re working to ensure normal interaction between the party-based and the public protest segment. This was the purpose of the forum: to find common ground and formulate our demands, and to speak with one voice and one process.”
On November 21, while the ROK rallied on the anniversary of the first “Euromaidan” protest, the next OUN-B leader Oleh Medunytsia made a trip to Buenos Aires to rally diaspora support for the “Resistance Movement,” and the U.S. media was captivated by testimony given during Donald Trump’s first impeachment inquiry by Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council official. (In the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine over two years later, Hill told Politico that we are already “in the middle of a third World War, whether we’ve fully grasped it or not.”)
“Meanwhile, Bill Taylor is back doing his thing in Kyiv,” tweeted one reporter. William J. Taylor, another star witness of Trump’s first impeachment inquiry, served as the U.S. Chargé d’Affairs to Ukraine from mid-2019 until the end of the year. “Six years ago today, brave Ukrainians, determined to achieve a better, European future, gathered on the Maidan and called for change,” tweeted the U.S. embassy along with a video of Taylor. “The U.S. stands firmly with all Ukrainians who are continuing to work, day in and out, to fully realize the aspirations of the #Euromaidan.”
What about Andriy Levus and his “Resistance Movement,” which could reasonably claim to be “founded by the leaders of the Maidan Self-Defense”? The U.S. leader of OUN-B once described Bill Taylor as “an old friend… and I don’t think we could have a better friend here in the United States.”
Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky met face-to-face on December 9 in Paris for the first round of Normandy Format talks between Russia and Ukraine (moderated by France and Germany) in over three years. A week earlier, the Capitulation Resistance Movement appealed to the Ukrainian World Congress and “all organizations of the Ukrainian Diaspora to organize on December 9 public expressions of support for CRM (demonstrations, press conference, statements of support, etc).”
On December 8 at the Old Mill Toronto Hotel, which came up in Part 2 of this series, the League of Ukrainian Canadians sponsored a lecture by Serhiy Kvit, the Banderite leader on the ROK Strategic Council. Kvit took pictures in Canada with Jason Kenney, the right-wing Alberta premier; Erin O’Toole, the next leader of the Conservative Party; James Bezan, the Conservative Shadow Minister of Defense; Yvan Baker, the next Liberal chairman of the Canada Ukraine Parliamentary Friendship Group; and Andriy Shevchenko, the Ambassador of Ukraine to Canada.
Petro Poroshenko addressed protesters in Kyiv, and the Ukrainian World Congress staged a “Stop Russian Aggression” rally in Paris that was joined by prominent Azov veterans and an advisor to Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs. At the time, journalist Oleksiy Kuzmenko suggested that the latter’s presence with Azov leaders “may be yet another example of how close the far-right Azov Movement / National Corps remains to Ukraine’s government, and in particular Azov’s historic backer Arsen Avakov,” the powerful Interior Minister from 2014-21.
Obviously, there was no diplomatic breakthrough in Paris. The next day, Avakov announced while Putin, Zelensky, Macron, and Merkel ate dinner that “no betrayal” had taken place. That evening, the nationalists temporarily declared victory. ROK Coordination Council member and Kyiv Security Forum senior fellow Mykhailo Basarab told protesters in Kyiv, with Azov leader Andriy Biletsky standing behind him on stage (and next to Andriy Levus), there is “no need for indefinite protests, as Zelensky did not cross red lines.” But they would be back. “If we are called Banderites, then we should be proud of it!” the ROK declared on January 1, 2020, the 111th anniversary of Stepan Bandera’s birth.
In mid-January 2020 I first published the aforementioned OUN-B whistleblower complaint on Medium, which was taken down. I reposted it on Substack and started the ‘Bandera Lobby Blog’ in March, shortly after meeting Walter Zaryckyj, the U.S. leader of OUN-B, at the National Press Club in Washington. The Center for US-Ukrainian Relations (CUSUR), which Zaryckyj has led since its start in 2000, is arguably the most important OUN-B front group in the United States, and grew out of the “informational arm” of the Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation.
I tried to attend that year’s “US-Ukraine Security Dialogue,” an annual all-day conference organized by CUSUR. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to make a scene or quietly observe, but accomplished neither. Entering the conference room while Michael Carpenter was speaking, I took the nearest available seat. Walter Zaryckyj immediately recognized me and came over to escort me out of the room. Zaryckyj’s sidekick got up and walked across the front of the room to join us outside, abandoning his duties as a translator for Carpenter’s Banderite co-panelist. Zaryckyj insisted that the three of us take a photo.
The next panel discussion (“Optimizing the Outcome of the New Normandy Talks and Preparing for Possible Pitfalls”) had John Herbst, the director of the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council and a former Ambassador of the United States to Ukraine (2003-2006), sitting next to Volodymyr Vasylenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat and elderly member of the ROK Strategic Council.
Vasylenko, who spoke first, promoted the “Movement Against Capitulation,” which the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert blog had recently described as “a democratic movement made up of distinguished Ukrainian diplomats and experts.” After the “Euro-Atlantic Security Leadership Group” released a 12 step plan for “greater security for Ukraine” in February, the UkraineAlert blog republished a Facebook post by the ROK that the think tank titled, “How Kyiv views the 12 step plan.” A year later, the Atlantic Council and Kyiv Security Forum released their own 12 step plan for the Biden administration to strengthen the US-Ukraine alliance.
Herbst explained why he felt that “the Minsk negotiations have been absolutely worthless, absolutely worthless.” According to Herbst, there were only two periods of “serious negotiations” (which didn’t include Ukraine, Germany, or France). First there was early-to-mid 2016 between Putin advisor Vladislav Surkov and State Department official Victoria Nuland, “and they stopped when it became clear that… Trump is going to become the candidate of the Republican Party, and then you had another six month period [in mid-to-late 2017] between Surkov and Kurt Volker,” the Trump appointee who warned Zelensky about “the Giuliani factor.” Herbst said Russia halted “those interesting talks” to wait for the results of Ukrainian elections, but “we’ve not had serious talks since January of ‘18.” Later on, Herbst added,
My sense is we’re not going to see capitulation coming from the Zelensky team, if only, but I’m not saying this is the only reason, but if only because they recognize that in order to make peace they have to carry a large majority of their public with them, and that includes at least some slice of nationalist-minded Ukrainians… And I know that the civil activists in Ukraine are deeply, deeply concerned. Their concerns are understandable. Are they right? Count me uncertain… So to my mind, let’s just sit back and watch.
Later that month, the Kyiv Security Forum senior fellow on the ROK Coordination Council said that if Zelensky “wants to live in peace with his nation, he must seek understanding with the active part of society grounded in the belief in the strong state,” or as Herbst put it, “nationalist-minded Ukrainians.” Oleksiy Kuzmenko noted that this statement from Mykhailo Basarab posted by the Capitulation Resistance Movement suggested that Zelensky’s unprecedented election victories in 2019 only granted him “formal legitimacy.” Basarab basically said that nationalists (“the active part of society…”) are “the source of real, not formal, legitimacy of the Ukrainian government,” and that “passive” Zelensky voters will not form a new “anti-Maidan” to defend him.
A day after Walter Zaryckyj’s “US-Ukraine Security Dialogue” in Washington, the OUN-B released a statement “on the Formation of a ‘Capitulation and Revanche Coalition’ in Ukraine,” urging all patriotic Ukrainians, including those abroad, “not to be silent and not to sit with folded hands. Time is running out. The fate of our state depends on each of us. If we unite and act, we will win.” A week later on Ukrainian Volunteer Day, the ROK and Azov led an allegedly 10,000 strong “March of Patriots,” which according to Kuzmenko culminated in chants of “Out with Zelensky!”
Meanwhile, the Banderite-led Ukrainian World Congress condemned the “unacceptable” decision of the Trilateral Contact Group (Ukraine, Russia, OSCE) to create a Consultation Council for separatists in eastern Ukraine, stressing “there can be no direct negotiations with the leaders of Russia-controlled terrorist organizations of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.”
“Zelensky recruited by Russian special services in Oman?!” asked the Capitulation Resistance Movement. “Stop Revanche” was once the name of an OUN-B campaign that paved the way for “Protect Ukraine” and the “Resistance Movement.” Now it was the name of an investigative journalism project on Petro Poroshenko’s Channel 5, which interviewed five people (including Andriy Levus and three other ROK leaders) for a 20 minute segment about Zelensky’s secretive trip to Oman earlier that year. Levus, wearing a Capitulation Resistance Movement hoodie, suggested to Channel 5 that Russian intelligence recruited Zelensky in Oman.
“Stop revanche — do not allow capitulation!” declared the OUN-B leadership, which condemned the “treasonous” decision of the Trilateral Contact Group (TCG). The OUN-B demanded that heads roll: in particular, Andriy Yermak, the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, and Leonid Kuchma, the former president who represented Ukraine in the TCG, and Volodymyr Zelensky, if he didn’t fire them. “The authorities still have a chance to prevent this [capitulation],” warned the OUN-B. “But if they do not do this, they should clearly understand that there are enough forces in Ukraine” to stop their “surrender.”
“We are getting ready for massive spring walks when days get warmer,” said Andriy Levus, according to whom “the President, Cabinet, Parliament, prosecution, and law enforcement are infected with pro-Russian revanche,” so the goal was to remove “all of these chaps from power.” The ROK planned nationwide “Stop Revanche” protests on May 24. “This is essentially a start of a campaign for government change,” Levus said. “The government understands only the power of the streets.”
On the anniversary of the May 2, 2014 massacre in Odessa, the ROK celebrated the “Victory Day over the Russian world” with a statement by Coordination Council member Andriy Yusov, who is now a spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate. “Let’s gather in columns of six people each and go to Kulikovo Field,” Yusov said into a megaphone that day in Odessa, before a mob attacked the city’s “anti-Maidan” protest camp and killed dozens of people.
On May 3, the ROK published a statement by another Coordination Council member (and co-coordinator of “Free People”) calling out Zelensky for not recognizing the “Odessa patriots” as heroes. “Thank you for burying Putin’s ‘Novorossiya’ six years ago, on May 2, 2014!” A few days later, the Capitulation Resistance Movement published an English language “APPEAL BY ACTIVISTS OF THE REVOLUTION OF DIGNITY.”
The threat of revanche is growing in Ukraine… We, activists and participants of the Revolution of Dignity, soldiers-defenders of Ukraine from Russia’s aggression, volunteers and public activists, politicians and diplomats, cultural and artistic figures, patriots of our state, give notice to the current government to cease and desist from attacks on the ideals of Maidan and Ukraine’s European choice.
The Revolution of Dignity cannot be stopped. The Maidan has not been a random or spontaneous revolt. The Maidan has been an authentic expression of national and social solidarity, mutual support, and self-sacrifice of Ukrainians. The Maidan is a public outpouring that will inevitably establish a new Ukraine. Regardless of the differences in views and political beliefs, we have been, are and will continue to be united and standing on guard for freedom and justice for Ukraine.
Do not test the will of free people…
The ROK organized “Stop Revanche” rallies across the country on May 24. Oleksiy Kuzmenko noticed that protesters staged a menacing scene in Sumy, northeastern Ukraine: “mock executioner’s block, stake (as in burning at the stake), dummy in noose…” The day before, several ROK leaders and allies signed a “Statement on the Ukrainian-American Strategic Partnership” by the Kyiv Security Forum. That included Borys Potapenko, the Ukrainian American president of the OUN-B’s “International Council in Support of Ukraine.”
The Kyiv Post published an article by OUN-B member Serhiy Kvit: “What is the Capitulation Resistance Movement and why does it matter?” In this puff piece, the ROK advisor claimed that the movement is “center-right,” and denied that it “engage[s] in blackmail or extortion by threatening a third ‘Maidan’.” In early June, Azov leader Andriy Biletsky basically told Poroshenko’s Channel 5 that his neo-Nazi movement is running the show. “If we don’t come to a ‘No Capitulation!’ event it will miss 50% of its manpower,” Biletsky said. “You want a rally or a small protest?” According to Fabrice Deprez, a journalist who attended the May 24 protest in Kyiv, “I’d say 50% is a slight exaggeration but not too far off the mark.”
Less than a week after Biletsky’s interview on Channel 5, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine charged Petro Poroshenko with “abusing his power by forcing his Foreign Intelligence Service chief to commit the crime of exceeding his authority.” Another week later, Poroshenko spoke to hundreds of supporters who rallied outside his court hearing. Andriy Parubiy declared on the steps of the Pechersk District Court of Kyiv, “We have to bring closer the day when we send Zelensky out of his office — after Yanukovych to Rostov. I’m positive that it will come soon, and Ukraine will win.”
Around this time, an excited OUN-B member (and ROK supporter) in Long Island texted their leader in the United States, “Key to successful Maidan, as bad as it sounds, is Poroshenko being in jail for the time being.” According to polling, Zelensky’s disapproval rating grew to 45% that month, but only 30% of Ukrainians viewed Poroshenko as the victim of political persecution. Arresting Poroshenko was however apparently a red line for Ukraine’s “Western partners.”
The Canadian and U.S. embassies subtweeted Zelensky’s government for prosecuting Poroshenko. “The justice system should not be used for the purpose of settling political scores,” said the U.S. embassy. “History tells us that appearance of interference and revanchism only breeds more of the same,” said the Canadians, who took a more ominous tone in defense of the “Revolution of Dignity.” The British ambassador tweeted, “Justice needs to be delivered impartially and independently in Ukraine.”
Volodymyr Zelensky accused his predecessor of being an “experienced manipulator” who made international allies view him with suspicion as an “enemy of Ukraine.” Melinda Haring, the deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, warned that jailing Poroshenko would mean that Zelensky “will go down in the history books as just another lackluster post-Soviet president.”
Andriy Levus called on patriots to unite and “start the Ukrainian offensive!” Ihor Lapin, another ROK coordinator and former company commander in the nationalist Aidar battalion, which Amnesty International accused of war crimes in 2014, soon declared, “This is not revanche! This is a full-fledged offensive of the Russian Federation on all fronts using agents of influence, the fifth column and the dictatorship of Zelensky!” A few months later, Lapin called Zelensky a “little Adolf Hitler” on Ukrainian TV, which the ROK shared on social media.
That summer, Michael Carpenter, a foreign policy advisor to presidential candidate Joe Biden, reportedly told Politico that if elected, Biden “would sharply increase shipments of lethal weapons to Ukraine in an escalation of the Obama administration’s policy toward the country.” Carpenter, who worked in Barack Obama’s White House as the Russia director on the National Security Council and as a “special advisor” to the vice president, once complained at a Banderite CUSUR conference about the “ultra uber cautious Obama administration… members of which were afraid of their own shadow.”
“We can give Ukraine all the Javelin missiles we want, but if Russia has political influence in that country through various corrupt relationships, then [they] are walking in through the back door while we’ve got our eyes glued to the front door,” Carpenter told Politico in July 2020. “We have to promote Ukraine sovereignty in a holistic way, which means both military support and security assistance, but also helping Ukraine beat back this — growing, by the way — Russian covert influence within its politics.”
Later that year, Carpenter appears to have authored a statement on “Joe Biden’s Vision for America’s Relationship with Ukraine” that the Biden-Harris campaign released to “Ukrainian Americans for Biden” on October 14, the fake birthday of the OUN-B’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army that has been celebrated as the “Day of the Defender” in Ukraine since 2015.
Toward the end of the 2020 Kyiv Security Forum in October, following a speech from the Ukrainian defense minister, the Atlantic Council held a session on what the U.S. presidential election would mean for Ukraine. Melinda Haring moderated the panel, which included her boss, former U.S. ambassador John Herbst. “Does it really matter for Ukraine if Trump or Biden is elected,” she asked him, “since we see Ukraine and the Zelensky administration increasingly turning inward, and less interested in what the West has to say?”
It was in response to this question that Herbst ultimately said, “Zelensky has a choice. He can bow down to Kremlin dictates, or he can pursue policies which ensure Western support, and when it’s that choice, the decision, I think, is almost inevitable.” After being introduced as “one of the most influential people defining [Ukraine] policies” in Washington, Michael Carpenter delivered the final speech at the event, in which he referred to “revanchist forces” as proxies for “authoritarian oligarchy.”
So I am hopefully, cautiously optimistic, that with a change of leadership in the United States, that Washington will once again be at the forefront to—again, with our European partners and allies—in pushing for reform and standing with democratic movements, and really advancing the cause of liberal democracy in this global competition. Because the other forces on the other side are very active, and they are not letting up…
Hoping to curry favor with the incoming Biden administration, Zelensky finally decided to “pursue policies which ensure Western support” and “beat back this — growing, by the way — Russian covert influence within its politics.” Days after the inauguration of Joe Biden, the Ukrainian government banned three television stations associated with pro-Russian oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk. By that point, Zelensky’s approval rating had cratered and Medvedchuk’s political party took the lead in polls. The sanctions, sought by Washington hawks and Ukrainian nationalists, “meant the scrapping of the Kremlin’s strategy, which it had been trying to implement in Ukraine since 2015.” Russia soon began to mass thousands of troops on the border.
