Front of the Month
The American OUN Fund
Last month, under new management in Ukraine, the OUN-B “restored” its “Defense of Ukraine Fund” (Fond Oborony Ukrayiny, FOU) that was created fifty years ago in Toronto. Also known as the “OUN Fund,” “Liberation Fund,” and “Struggle Fund,” it never ceased to exist, but almost a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Bandera Organization has decided to go public with this secretive “facade structure.” Concurrent with the second World Congress of Free Ukrainians in October 1973, Toronto, which was organized by rival Nationalists, the OUN-B held a “world conference” of the “Organizations of the Ukrainian Liberation Front” at which it created the “Defense of Ukraine Fund” (FOU). This was done on the initiative of Stepan Bandera’s successor Yaroslav Stetsko, who led the OUN-B and its “Liberation Front” as well as the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, “the largest and most important umbrella for former Nazi collaborators in the world.”
The FOU is based in the US, Canada, and Britain, because “any investment in Ukraine is risky.” The OUN has been bankrolled by supporters in North America since the 1930s. By 1974, this Fund was represented in the United States by the newly established Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation (UAFF), which owns the Ukrainian Home Dnipro in Buffalo, New York and 40% of the OUN-B headquarters building in Kyiv. The Organization for Defense of the Four Freedoms of Ukraine (ODFFU), established by Displaced Banderites in 1946, led the “Liberation Front” in the US. With loans from the FOU approved by Yaroslav Stetsko, in 1977 the ODFFU bought the “OULF Home” in Manhattan—the US headquarters of OUN-B, formerly known as the Home of the Organizations of the Ukrainian Liberation Front. (That year, the Banderite “Liberation Front” boycotted the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, and in 1980 took over the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America.) The loans came with an understanding that although the ODFFU technically owns the building, the real owner is the OUN-B. That understanding came to an end in recent years, but like the FOU, has also been “restored.”
Whereas the ODFFU is ostensibly a democratic organization, with leaders “elected” at national conventions, the UAFF board of directors is appointed by the OUN-B as the US affiliate of the FOU and the financial arm of the TP-A, or Banderite “Field Leadership in America.” By 2010, after decades of accumulating interest on several loans, the ODFFU owed the Defense of Ukraine Fund over a million dollars. Last I heard, that debt was mostly paid off, but Stefan Romaniw of Australia allegedly spent the last couple years of his tenure as the OUN-B chairman (2009-22) trying to get the rest of the money after the OUN-B leaders of the UAFF re-established control in the ODFFU, which may have been a pyrrhic victory for the old guard. It was an ugly feud that drove many out of the former “Liberation Front” in the US, and triggered the sensational whistleblower complaint about the UAFF, ODFFU, and OUN-B that inspired me to start the Bandera Lobby Blog three years ago.
The UAFF raised over a million dollars in 2022, about a third of it from the Buffalo, New York area, which hosted an ODFFU convention closely managed by the TP-A last autumn. Another significant chunk of the money (~15%) came from the PayPal Giving Fund, which partnered with the UAFF after Russia invaded Ukraine. Funds raised by the OUN-B in the United States were largely donated to the “Free Ukraine Resistance Movement” (FURM), an obscure so-called “partisan outfit.” Last spring, the FURM produced a “war anthem” with a band that reportedly then released an NFT collection “in partnership with Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation, which will coordinate distribution of proceeds to the Free Ukraine Resistance Movement.” The FURM was formerly known as the far-right “Movement to Resist Capitulation” that threatened to overthrow the government in Kyiv. (Click here for more on the OUN-B and the “Capitulation Resistance Movement”.)
The OUN-B used to compile lists of FOU donors, published in the newsletter of the “World Ukrainian Liberation Front” and the Canadian Banderite newspaper, “Ukrainian Echo.” Until 2018-19, the UAFF published “The National Tribune,” the US edition of the far-right OUN-B newspaper, “Way to Victory.” According to tax forms filed with the IRS, the mission of the UAFF and its newspaper has been to “promote democratic and market processes in Ukraine,” which is laughable. Some of these filings reference a loan to the ODFFU. In recent years, the “National Tribune” and “Way to Victory” have named donors to the OUN Fund. Every Christmas season, the OUN-B launches a fundraising drive for the FOU. I have the list of donors from 2011-2014 in the United States, but have yet to compile all the information I can from the OUN-B newspapers. In the winter of 2014-15, appealing to members and supporters of the OUN-B to make generous donations to the FOU, the leadership of the Bandera Organization said that doing so would help them to “purge Ukraine of Ukrainophobes” and “cleanse government bodies.” The prior OUN-B leader has said that their activity is “impossible without proper financial support.”
The FOU is probably represented in Canada by the BCU Foundation, and in Ukraine by the Stepan Bandera Center for National Revival, which we will save for future “Fronts of the Month.” The international OUN Fund is allegedly overseen by Mykola Matwijiwskyj and Petro Lapczak, leaders of the Banderite network in Britain. Matwijiwskyj, a high-level priest in the Ukrainian Catholic Church in his country, is an honorary member of the Youth Nationalist Congress, the far-right OUN-B front in Ukraine that spearheaded the “Capitulation Resistance Movement.” He is also listed as the beneficiary of the OUN-B headquarters building in Kyiv. But more about the British Banderites another day…
