'Bandera Lobby' Announcements
I’m excited to finally announce the start of my “hidden history of Little Ukraine” tours in Manhattan next weekend, about the history of the Organization of the Ukrainian Nationalists in the United States. For now, you can sign up here.
If all goes well, I’ll do the tours for a month or until it gets too cold, and then I can get started again next spring, with another tour about the contemporary OUN-B network. But you don’t necessarily have to wait until 2025 for the latter. Stick around after the “hidden history” tour, and I can probably give you an expedited version of the sequel, especially if you “Buy Me a Coffee.”
In some other personal news, I was recently interviewed by the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), which has been one of the only English language news sites to consistently publish articles about the rise of the Ukrainian far-right. Earlier this year, the Ukrainian government banned the WSWS, which it smeared as “a Russian propaganda and information agency,” after the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) detained Bogdan Syrotiuk, a young WSWS contributor, on trumped up “treason” charges.
The SBU expects people to believe that it seized a backpack with the Russian chauvinist “Z” symbol from an office of Syrotiuk’s Young Guard of Bolshevik Leninists. As Trotskyists, they have consistently opposed the Russian invasion of Ukraine and “called for the unity of Ukrainian and Russian workers against the nationalist-chauvinist governments” of both countries. Bogdan Syrotiuk, who is said to be in poor health, faces 15 years to life in prison. You can read more about his case on WSWS, which is leading a campaign to free this Ukrainian political prisoner.
The central allegation leveled against Bogdan Syrotiuk is that he is guilty of high treason. The basis of this charge is that Bogdan has been for the past two years “engaged in the preparation of publications commissioned by representatives of a Russian propaganda and information agency, the World Socialist Web Site.”
