Bandera Lobby Blob Summit

Review of 2024 'US-Ukraine Security Dialogue'

OUN-B member Walter Zaryckyj at one of his events in Washington, DC

Introduction: The ‘Bandera Lobbyists’

This year’s “US-Ukraine Security Dialogue” took place at an event space located one block from the White House. The annual conference is organized by the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations (CUSUR), an OUN-B front group established in 2000. According to the program, the executive coordinator of the event was Christine Balko. She is probably still the director of the “Organizations of the Ukrainian Statehood Front” in the United States.

The “Front” is a coalition of OUN-B “facade structures,” some of which include Balko in the leadership. For example, Christine Balko is the treasurer of the Organization for the Defense of Four Freedoms for Ukraine (ODFFU) and the secretary of the Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation, which according to contemporary OUN-B documents is the financial arm of the Banderite “Land Leadership of America.”

The administrative coordinator of the event was Mykola Hryckowian, who is the Washington bureau chief of CUSUR and the president of ODFFU. He attained the presidency in a pyrrhic coup d’etat in 2019. The technical coordinator was Andrij Dobriansky, one of the leaders of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, which the “Front” has dominated since another damaging coup in 1980. The program coordinator was Walter Zaryckyj, the executive director of CUSUR and the president of the Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation, who has allegedly been replaced as the chairman of the OUN-B’s “Land Leadership of America.”

As always, the neoconservative American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC) was the main sponsor of the “security dialogue.” The steering committee for this year’s event consisted of three AFPC leaders, at least four OUN-B members, and three Banderite proxies from the corrupt Ukrainian Congress Committee. The small list of patrons included two additions featured in the latest post of the “Bandera Lobby Blog” — the Vovk Foundation and Civil Military Innovation Institute, based in Morgantown, West Virginia. The Banderite brothers behind this new support for CUSUR have also tried to reactivate the ODFFU in nearby Pittsburgh, and one of them (a subscriber of this newsletter) said that I should be hearing from their attorney.

The illegitimate ODFFU president, Hryckowian from eastern Pennsylvania, accompanied an AFPC delegation that traveled to Ukraine in late January. Ostap Kryvdyk, a friend of the “Bandera Lobby” in Kyiv, arranged their itinerary, which included meetings with the leadership of the ministry of defense (on the eve of Zelensky firing Zaluzhny), the deputy chair of Ukrainian parliament Olena Kondratiuk, deputy minister of foreign affairs Iryna Borovets, deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration Olha Stefanishyna, and other officials.

AFPC’s president Herman Pirchner and director of external relations Annie Swingen joined the trip to Ukraine and the steering committee of this CUSUR event, which concluded with a reception at the AFPC headquarters in Washington. The front room has a framed picture of the think tank’s leadership with far-right Ukrainian politician Andriy Parubiy, who led a neo-Nazi paramilitary organization in the 1990s. When Parubiy played the role of statesman in Ukraine (2014-19), his foreign policy advisor, Ostap Kryvdyk, organized his trips to DC with the Banderite “Statehood Front.”

The American Foreign Policy Council — the arrow is pointing to/from Walter Zaryckyj’s best friend in Washington, AFPC president Herman Pirchner, who is standing next to former neo-Nazi paramilitary leader Andriy Parubiy.

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February 29, 2024: ‘US-Ukraine Security Dialogue’

The livestream started a little late, after Walter Zaryckyj delivered his opening remarks, in which he typically marvels at hosting an event with such distinguished speakers. (He privately boasts of his powerful contacts, for example, “fucking generals.”) In this case, the first speaker, Kyle Parker of the Helsinki Commission that advises Congress, was recently tarnished by a report in the New York Times: “A senior Capitol Hill staff member who is a longtime voice on Russia policy is under congressional investigation over his frequent trips to Ukraine’s war zones and providing what he said was $30,000 in sniper gear to its military.” He spoke at a CUSUR conference in 2022, and served on the steering committee of five of these events by 2005 (usually with Steve Bandera, the Canadian grandson of the infamous OUN-B leader). The livestream started just in time to hear Parker channel the Banderite spirit world: “Helping Ukraine defeat a neo-Stalinist Russia should be seen as unfinished business from the Second World War.”

The first panel discussion was moderated by retired diplomat William B. Taylor, a vice president of the Orwellian-named U.S. Institute of Peace, which is supposedly “an American federal institution tasked with promoting conflict resolution and prevention worldwide.” It was three years ago, shortly after Joe Biden took office, that Taylor and his colleagues from the influential Atlantic Council addressed CUSUR’s “security dialogue” on the eve of publishing a militarist policy paper, Biden and Ukraine: A strategy for the new administration. Taylor reported that they already met with “members of the Biden administration team that’s focused on Ukraine,” and asked the White House to sharply increase military aid for Kyiv to half a billion dollars per year.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the United States has committed tens of billions of dollars in “security assistance,” the vast majority of which is going to the U.S. arms industry that bankrolls think tanks like the Atlantic Council and the Center for European Policy Analysis. The latter employed retired U.S. general Ben Hodges, who commanded the army in Europe from 2014-18. His commentary about World War II — “it was actually millions of Ukrainians, not millions of Russians, that died” — was a highlight of the 2021 “security dialogue.” This year during the first panel discussion, Hodges downplayed the significance of Ukraine losing Avdiivka, but acknowledged his reputation as a “cheerleader.” After the session ended, he returned to his front row seat adjacent to OUN-B member Christine Balko.

Luke Coffey oversaw foreign policy at the far-right Heritage Foundation from 2015 until 2022, when he made the move to the neoconservative Hudson Institute. During the first panel discussion, he said that the U.S. needs to prepare for a long war in Ukraine. “I hear this all the time in Washington about ‘forever wars’ and ‘endless wars,’ I absolutely hate this. I hate these terms,” Coffey said. “Americans are not tired of forever wars. I think this has been a made up, inside the Beltway argument.”

Almost three hours later, Kurt Volker insisted that “we need to have our own people embedded in Ukrainian fighting forces.” Formerly the U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine (2017-19), a vocal opponent of the Minsk peace process, and lobbyist for Raytheon, which produces Javelin missiles, Volker turned his head toward his fellow panelist, a Banderite defense contractor, and lamented “the fact that we prohibit uniformed personnel from being present in Ukraine alongside the Ukrainians means that we are not learning, and getting real time feedback, and knowing what we actually ought to be doing.”

During the next Q&A period, Col. Vince Mucker, sitting behind Ben Hodges and Christine Balko, introduced himself as the next U.S. military attaché in Kyiv. Philip Breedlove, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in Europe, stressed to Mucker that “a big part of solving the conundrum … is completely about policy, when we get a policy that allows us to shoot the archer [in Russia] … we can put dumb 2000 pound GPS bombs on these sites.”

Volker, the moderator of this panel, chimed in, “I would add to that [analogy], not only shoot the archer, but shoot the arrow factory.” With Breedlove nodding along, Volker chuckled and continued, “or maybe you don’t have to shoot it, maybe you can go right up to it and blow it up, with a little help from some friends in the Middle East.” He laughed again but got serious. “So I think that’s something, frankly, we should be talking with Israel about.”

A few minutes later, Volker said to Mucker in the audience, “as you take up your new duties, I hope you’re able to make a persuasive case about how some active duty [U.S.] personnel embedded in Ukrainian forces as observers—not participants, but observers—would actually help us give much better advice and much better equipment.” After the lunch break, the deputy chief of mission at the Ukrainian embassy in Washington predicted that “American soldiers will have to be engaged, sooner or later.”

The second half of the all-day event inadvertently dedicated about thirty minutes to the scenario that Ukraine collapses, and the West is faced with the question of supporting a nationalist insurgency. The main speaker, Paul Goble, is the Jamestown Foundation’s “specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia.” His apocalyptic obsession with breaking up Russia rivals any Banderite. According to Jamestown, “he served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.”

The neo-Nazi Azov Movement’s 3rd Assault Brigade apparently sees itself as the spiritual successor of the OUN-B’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).

Goble absurdly claimed that “even Stalin couldn’t defeat the UPA,” referring to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the extremist paramilitary wing of OUN-B that butchered Poles and Jews under Nazi occupation before resisting Soviet control of western Ukraine with death squad brutality. Goble argued that “talking about these things is terribly important,” to let Moscow know that Russia cannot occupy Ukraine. Almost ten minutes later, he said, “I think the most important thing we can do is to encourage the Ukrainians to recover their own tradition” (of Banderite insurgency).

… to talk about that tradition, and set up radio broadcasts of various kinds that will suggest to the Russians there is a bigger partisan movement than may even exist. That’s one of the things you do … I would like to see us work in that direction first, and that’s the way you can build a partisan operation today, and with broadcasting that’s very possible … What I’m hoping for in the short term is that we realize that this is a valuable thing to try, that we encourage talking about the old partisan movement [UPA] to remind the Russians what they’re up against … Ukraine is fighting for more than itself, not only in the West, but among the non-Russian peoples and the regions of the Russian Federation, so I wanted to stress — I was thrilled to be asked to part of this today — I wanted to stress talking about partisans and organizing them where Kyiv can, because that is about not only winning the current war, but winning the much larger war against Russian imperialism, and making the world truly safe for democracy finally.

Banderite leader Walter Zaryckyj asked, “why haven’t people in Washington picked up on” what Goble was throwing down? “My guess is, I believe that the Russian Federation will disintegrate,” but without support from Washington. That was Goble, not Zaryckyj. Almost eight years ago, he wondered, “Is It Time for an Updated ‘Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations?’” Inspired by this Banderite concept, and with some encouragement from the Jamestown Foundation, the OUN-B has created the “Anti-Imperial Block of Nations” to reinforce maximalist war aims for Ukraine. (More about this “ABN 2.0” coming soon on the “Bandera Lobby Blog.”)

During the next coffee break, ODFFU president Mykola Hryckowian gave instructions to Yuriy Kmiotek, a far-right Banderite youth leader from Cleveland, to prepare the room for the arrival of the keynote speaker, Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL). Some of Kmiotek’s hobbies include dressing up as a member of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police that formed the backbone of the UPA after helping the Germans to carry out the “Holocaust by Bullets.” Senator Duckworth appeared alongside Pavlo Bandriwsky, the wealthy OUN-B leader in Chicago who is apparently recognized by politicians as the head of its Ukrainian community.

Last year, Pavlo Bandriwsky sat next to Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) at a Ukrainian event in Chicago. On the right is Yuriy Kmiotek dressed as a member of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police.

“Have you been in touch with the Ukrainian soldiers in Bethesda right now getting new limbs made?” Duckworth asked Bandriwsky before the session started. “I think I introduced them to you.” The Banderite leader answered her, “yes, yes… actually we had a big rally, couple thousand people down on Michigan Avenue last Saturday, and we had two of those soldiers.” Walter Zaryckyj, a self-described “prisoner” of “Little Ukraine” in Manhattan, interrupted their small talk.

“You’ve seen them all, this morning and afternoon,” Zaryckyj told the audience — the “finest generals,” “finest senior diplomats,” and “finest congressional staffers.” He thanked the Senator, and almost seemed to acknowledge passing the torch to Paul Bandriwsky as the OUN-B leader in the United States.

All I can do is pass it over to someone who I want to honor. Paul, we’ve been friends a long, long time. And I can tell you this. As much as I love my New York, you crazy Ukes in Chicago really know how to organize things. And so I leave it in your stable hands—ok?

There have been significant Ukrainian demonstrations in Chicago since 2022, and the Banderite leaders of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA)’s “Illinois Division” have managed to stay relevant. In Chicago, new organizations that are responsible for a huge chunk of the money raised since 2022 have apparently accepted the Banderite-led status quo, which has been great for Bandriwsky.

In New York, the mobilization of the Ukrainian community has been relatively weak, with little to no help from the Banderites, who have also been asleep at the wheel in Washington when there isn’t a CUSUR conference. Iryna Nauholnyk-Cohen, sitting next to Christine Balko in the front row, complained on Facebook this year that Michael Sawkiw — the UCCA representative in Washington, a Banderite puppet from New York, and participant in this event — has been “MIA. Won’t call anyone back. It’s shameful when Ukraine urgently needs our help.”

At the start of the war, OUN-B affiliated New Yorkers turned their attention to raising money for their cultish summer camp in the Hudson River Valley after a “suspicious fire” claimed a condemned building. The head of the camp’s fundraising committee suggested that I was responsible for the fire. The local Journal News reported that the Banderites suspected it was part of “Russia’s latest effort to wipe out Ukraine.” Then hundreds of heavy bulletproof vests were stolen from the UCCA headquarters in Manhattan, which also made the local news. Walter Zaryckyj, the executive director of the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations, hypothesized that these incidents were connected. They were both rumored to be inside jobs.

By mid-2022, a hot-headed Banderite, convicted embezzler, and raging misogynist, Steve Gbur, returned to “Little Ukraine” after many years in Florida. “Why didn’t someone Kick Moss’s ass,” he asked the head of the camp fundraising committee. Gbur’s lawyer is related to his ex-wife, and in-laws with OUN-B member Christine Balko. They led an ODFFU-inspired takeover of the Ukrainian Sports Club which was sitting on piles of cash in the process of relocating to Brooklyn. Since then, Gbur has been coming and going from the Banderite building in Manhattan, ostensibly as one of its managers; he was penalized for walking across the field during a women’s soccer match; and a judge recently struck down his Banderite-installed board of directors.

Phillip Karber is the president of the Potomac Foundation, and the Professor of Strategy & Praxis at Georgetown University’s Machiavelli Seminar in Florence, Italy. He visited the Banderites in Manhattan roughly 24 hours after Russia invaded Ukraine. Kyrylo Budanov, the chief of Defense Intelligence of Ukraine, contacted Karber less than a month later and asked him to write a series of reports. That summer, the militant think tanker delivered a grim “war report” at the dilapidated OUN-B summer camp in the foothills of the “Borscht Belt.” He wanted to see the damage from the fire, and told the Journal News, “I don’t think this place is at all a secret to the Russians.”

Screenshot from an overly dramatic article about a Banderite camp fire

Phil Karber delivered his report during the Fourth of July weekend, which for the Banderite campers (in depressing Ellenville, New York) includes the somber “Heroes’ Holiday” that is centered around the glorification of Nazi collaborators. Karber was introduced by ODFFU president Mykola Hryckowian, who is named after his father, an UPA veteran that helped to establish the camp’s “Heroes’ Monument,” which includes larger than life busts of Stepan Bandera, UPA commander Roman Shukhevych, and OUN founder Yevhen Konovalets. In the world imagined by Paul Goble, neo-Nazis from Ukraine might eventually Make Ellenville Great Again.

During this year’s “security dialogue,” Phil Karber also sat in the front row. He assured people, “there is an active insurgency in the occupied area now. I know because I went behind the lines, and interviewed some of them.” Two women from OUN-B sat between him and Ben Hodges. There was Christine Balko, the secretary, and Iryna Cohen, a former board member, of the Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation, which published an OUN-B affiliated newspaper until 2018. Yuriy Kmiotek, the “paleoconservative” teenager who might be interning with CUSUR, is the new U.S. representative of the OUN-B newspaper in Ukraine.

“Iryna from ODFFU,” as she introduced herself in one session, has assisted Phil Karber for years, among other things as a translator during many of his trips to the front line in Ukraine, which for him started in 2014, and for her in 2016. Just over a month ago this Banderite traveled with him to NATO headquarters in Brussels. She has said that I “started the Russian propaganda that led to this war.” It’s plausible that she put Karber in touch with the “Capitulation Resistance Movement” led by OUN-B in Ukraine. The former “International Secretary” of this far-right “Resistance Movement” arranged the meetings for the AFPC delegation in January.

Iryna Cohen and Phillip Karber in 2017 with Mamuka Mamulashvili, commander of the Georgian Legion in Ukraine, who vowed to take no prisoners in 2022, and has also visited the US headquarters building of OUN-B in Manhattan.

Although he spoke up about the “active insurgency,” Phil Karber again became the bearer of bad news. At the last CUSUR conference in October 2023, Karber explained that Budanov asked him to write a series of reports for NATO about what Ukraine needed for its 2022 counteroffensive. “We use the word counteroffensive very loosely,” he admitted. “In reality, the Russians decided to withdraw from Kyiv … likewise Kherson, likewise Kharkiv.”

According to Karber, “most of what we identified in our extensive report ended up being delivered, it was just too little, too late.” He claimed that NATO does not have a military strategy, so he went to NATO headquarters in January (with “Iryna from ODFFU”) to propose one. CUSUR got a preview of his presentation in October, when Karber warned that Ukraine and its “supporters” need to be “very careful,” and not just with Russia. “Democracies don’t do well in long wars. You either lose the long war, or you lose the democracy, or you lose both.”

He vented about Zelensky’s conflict with Zaluzhny, months before the general got fired, “it has to stop, and American friends of Ukraine need to say, cut it out!” Ukraine’s conflict with Poland made him even more upset: “What IDIOT would attack that benefactor?!” This time, Karber reported that men at the front now “call themselves meat,” and sounded bewildered that conscripting young people is an “extremely sensitive” issue in Ukraine. “This is not sustainable, they’re gonna have to call a national draft.”

Stephen Blank, a former senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, is another regular speaker at these events. “That’s a Russian operation,” he said about the Houthis in Yemen potentially cutting internet cables in the Red Sea. “It would not be surprising to see Russian drones or missiles coming from Russia, or Iranian missiles subcontracted from Iran, and so on … to create a second front, essentially, and ties us down.” Two days before the Hamas-led uprising in Gaza, this Cold Warrior from Brooklyn could hardly sound more excited for World War III.

“We should get up there and say to Mr. Putin and all these other wannabes on TV who wanna talk about nuclear wah,” Blank declared at the last CUSUR conference of 2023, “that means the end of the Russian state—period. I told my wife for example that we ought to respond the way Clint Eastwood did, and say to these guys: are you tired of living or are you feeling lucky? Go ahead, make my day!”

At the end of his panel discussion this year, Stephen Blank chatted with Volodymyr Havrylov from Ukraine, a retired major general who recently served as Deputy Minister of Defense. In that capacity he repeatedly predicted victory. “Russia will have to leave Crimea if they wish to exist as a country,” he said in 2022. “They still don’t understand that [their] propaganda is demonstrating a false picture of what is actually happening on the ground,” he said in 2023. Havrylov, as Ukraine’s former military attaché in Washington, is no stranger to CUSUR. “I’m an independent consultant, I’m available if anybody wants me,” Blank told Havrylov, “so if you need me for a project, let me know, I’ll give you a card.” At the end of the day, these “policy conferences” are Banderite networking events.

Walter Zaryckyj and one of his “fucking generals,” former NATO commander Wesley Clark, who usually participates in these events remotely, and once received an award from the “World Council of Ukrainian Statehood Organizations.”