'Liquidation of the Russian Empire'

The 'Bandera Lobby' and a 'dangerously dumb delusion' (Pt 1-2)

This series of the “Bandera Lobby Blog” is the culmination of several posts from 2022-23, but hopefully this can also be a good place to start.

• A New ABN? — Pt. 1, Pt. 2

• The ‘Capitulation Resistance Movement’ — Pt. 1, Pt. 2, Pt. 3 (TBC)

• Banderite Memory Warriors — Pt. 1, Pt. 2, Pt. 3 (TBC)

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“Bandera Readings” organizer Yuriy Syrotiuk: “Russia has seen its end”

‘Decolonizing Russia,’ Part One

Ten days before Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation,” Ukrainian neo-Nazi leader Yevhen Karas spoke excitedly about the possibility of full-scale war with Russia at the annual “Bandera Readings” in Kyiv. Ukraine, he said, would receive “so much weaponry, not because as some say, ‘the West is helping us,’ not because they want the best for us, but because … we have fun killing and we have fun fighting, and they’re like, ‘wow, let’s see what’s gonna happen’ … And now imagine Russia falls apart, turns into five different Russias or whatever.” In recent days, the “Nachtigall Battalion” of Karas’ 14th drone regiment, named after a Banderite unit in the Wehrmacht, has participated in Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk, Russia, which is mainly known for being the site of one of the largest battles of World War II.

“Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the next imperialist structure to undergo a similar process will be the former RSFSR or what it known today as the Russian Federation.” This was the prediction made almost thirty years ago by Borys Potapenko of Warren, Michigan, who had already become a notable member of the OUN-B, or Banderite faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. In recent years, he was an international coordinator of the Banderite-led “Capitulation Resistance Movement” in Ukraine that threatened to overthrow Volodymyr Zelensky if he seriously negotiated with Putin (about NATO, Donbass, Crimea, etc).

Over a month before Russia invaded, the “Capitulation Resistance Movement” started to promote the revival of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), another far-right organization led by OUN-B members. The ABN (1946-96) was ostensibly a coordinating body of anti-communist movements, many of which collaborated with Nazi Germany, and regarded itself as the leadership of a revolutionary struggle against Russian imperialism. It considered World War III to be “inevitable” and represented the “subjugated nations” of the Soviet Union in the extremist World Anti-Communist League. Potapenko predicted Russia’s collapse in the ABN newsletter about a year before the ABN officially dissolved.

The Capitulation Resistance Movement mostly disappeared from the scene in 2022, after the existential threat of peace in Ukraine was extinguished. Some of its leaders refocused their attention on creating the new ABN, or “Anti-Imperial Bloc of Nations,” with its goal being the “liquidation of the Russian empire.” Meanwhile, more prominent platforms started to promote the dismemberment of Russia.

In May 2022, the inaugural “Free Nations of Russia Forum” gathered several representatives of “non-Russian nations” in Warsaw. The most prominent speaker was Ilya Ponomarev, a shady Russian politician who went into exile in Ukraine — more about him next time. Paul Goble of the Jamestown Foundation commented that the meeting “recalls the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations during the Cold War era.” Rafis Kashapov, the so-called “Prime Minister of Independent Tatarstan,” sits on the Forum’s coordinating council. With two allies of OUN-B, he created “Free Idel-Ural,” an organization that co-founded the “Free Nations League” to represent the “non-Russian” peoples of Russia.

Later that month, a major U.S. magazine, The Atlantic, published “Decolonize Russia” by Casey Michel from the neoconservative Hudson Institute, which welcomed aboard Donald Trump’s former CIA director Mike Pompeo as a distinguished fellow in 2021. Michel reminded readers of Dick Cheney’s eternal wisdom. According to Robert Gates, after the USSR collapsed, Cheney “wanted to see the dismantlement … of Russia itself, so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world.”

In June, Michel joined an online meeting of the Helsinki Commission, a U.S. government agency created by Congress, to discuss “Decolonizing Russia: A Moral and Strategic Imperative.” Hanna Hopko, a hardline Ukrainian politician, friend of the “Bandera Lobby,” and dreamer of “Idel-Ural” independence, also took part in this meeting led by commission co-chair Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN). “Russia certainly has issues where they have, in essence, colonized their own country,” said the Congressman from Tennessee, the name of which is Cherokee. “It’s not a strict nation in the sense we’ve known it in the past.”

The second Free Nations of Russia Forum met in Prague in July. Paul Goble and Janusz Bugajski, another analyst from the Jamestown Foundation, addressed the conference, if only online. Goble was “reminiscing on the annual Captive Nations Week,” and Bugajski presented his new book, Failed State: A Guide to Russia’s Rupture. Participants signed a “Declaration on the Decolonization of Russia,” according to which “the Russian Federation is already on the verge of chaos and civil war. Only a complete and controlled decolonization of Russia can prevent this.” During the Cold War, the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations insisted that World War III was “inevitable,” and only a “revolutionary” military struggle from within the Soviet Union, supported by NATO powers, could prevent a nuclear holocaust.

The next Forum in Gdansk changed its name to the “Free Nations of PostRussia.” Participants called on the West to “refuse support and any form of assistance to the imperial ‘opposition’ of ‘unified Russia’.” Instead, Russia should be divided into dozens of countries. “History has accelerated extremely today — therefore, we must also accelerate … a complete and irreversible Decolonization of the Russian Federation,” according to the “Gdansk Manifesto.”

As 2022 came to an end, the Hudson Institute published a policy memo by senior fellow Luke Coffey on “Preparing for the Final Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Dissolution of the Russian Federation.” Among his “planning assumptions,” Coffey wrote, “Policymakers should assume that further fragmentation of Russia will be more like Chechnya in 1994 (brutal conflict) than Estonia in 1991 (peaceful and straightforward).”

“Americans are not tired of forever wars. I think this has been a made up, inside the Beltway argument,” Coffey said at the latest conference in Washington organized by OUN-B affiliated officers of the Manhattan-based “ODFFU, Inc.” (The Organization for Defense of Four Freedoms of Ukraine, or ODFFU, is an important OUN-B front group.) At a 1985 ABN conference in London, dedicated in large part to the Reagan administration’s “Star Wars” program, an ODFFU leader of the “American Friends of the ABN” said that “Russia should withdraw to her ethnic boundaries, and in this way only, Russia will be preserved from, I would say, perhaps, from the holocaust.”

The Atlantic Council polled dozens of “experts” about their predictions for the next decade, and reported that “40 percent of respondents expect Russia to break up internally by 2033 because of revolution, civil war, political disintegration, or some other reason.” This alarmed think tanker Christopher McCallion, who wrote an article for The Hill (“Russian disintegration is a dangerously dumb delusion”) in which he pointed out some of the obvious problems with this scenario.

If careless statements promoting regime change are ill-advised, officially advocating for the breakup of Russia — let alone any material support for separatist movements within Russia — would be dangerous in the extreme. Perhaps even more threatening than a deliberate Russian response would be an actual crackup of the world’s largest nuclear power, in which command and control systems break down, while stockpiles and scientists seek out new masters. …

Even if Russia fractured without a nuclear catastrophe along the way, there’s little reason to think this would be to the geostrategic benefit of the United States, which faces a far more formidable challenge in a rising China. Were a series of new states to proliferate in Russia’s vast, resource rich but sparsely-populated east, they quite possibly would become satellites of China. …

Finally, the paternalistic impulse to break up someone else’s country could blow back on our own humble multiethnic empire. What if China or Russia tried to make us return the half of Mexico we annexed not so long ago — including California, now the world’s fourth largest economy? Or to give the rest of the country back to its original owners, who remain subject to the shockingly abject conditions of the reservation system? Would this solve our own country’s problem with repeated interventions abroad? Let’s remember the old adage involving stones and glass houses.

A more realistic threat posed by this “dangerously dumb delusion” is that it fans the fascistic flames of a stab-in-the-back myth, and empowers the Ukrainian far-right after Kyiv is forced to the negotiating table, or worse. Shortly before the above article was published, the European Parliament in Brussels hosted the fifth “PostRussia Forum.” In late 2022, a map of Russia partitioned appeared in the office of Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov, with the new borders drawn by hand. A couple weeks later, Budanov turned 37, and carved a birthday cake of the same map. His spokesman is a former coordinator of the Capitulation Resistance Movement.

Soon it was time for another “Bandera Readings.” The topic for 2023 was “The philosophy of Ukrainian victory. Visions of Greater Ukraine.” For the first time, the Information Agency of the Ministry of Defense sponsored this annual far-right event, which included speeches from the usual suspects and a communications officer from the Ukrainian General Staff. As always, the chief organizer was Yuriy Syrotiuk, one of the leaders of the Svoboda party, who is also an OUN-B member, and moderated the panel discussion with Yevhen Karas in February 2022.

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‘Visions of Greater Ukraine,’ Part One

Last year Ukrainian nationalists celebrated the 150th birthday of their ideological great-grandfather Mykola Mikhnovsky, who dreamed of an ethnically pure Greater Ukraine “from the Carpathian Mountains to the Caucasus Mountains” in southern Russia. Because they still have influence in the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINM), this government agency honored Mikhnovsky on social media, and invited followers to take an online quiz about him. Its Banderite deputy director joined a roundtable at the Ukraine Crisis Media Center (UCMC), which at least used to be funded by Western governments. The discussion was about “Apostles of Ukrainian Statehood” — Mykola Mikhnovsky and Dmytro Dontsov, the grandfather of genocidal Ukrainian fascism.

The Stepan Bandera National Revival Center, in other words, the OUN-B headquarters in Kyiv, was behind the UCMC roundtable in late March 2023. Up to four of the six speakers were OUN-B members:

• Viktor Roh is obviously a leader of the OUN-B, as the longtime editor of its weekly newspaper, “The Way to Victory” (Shlach Peremohy), and the director of its Ukrainian Publishing House, which manages an online “Banderite Bookstore.” Although the OUN-B has become more moderate since World War II, one of its priorities is popularizing the far-right ideologues of the Nazi-era Ukrainian Nationalist movement. Earlier that month, the coordinator of the UCMC press center interviewed Roh. Wearing a hoodie of the OUN-B’s internationally active Ukrainian Youth Association, the Banderite editor reportedly said “our predecessors were right” that “it would be necessary to temporarily introduce a regime of dictatorship” after the victory of the “national revolution.”

• Volodymyr Tylischak, deputy director of the UINM, is a periodic contributor to the OUN-B newspaper and part of the “Ukrainian Studies of Strategic Research” (USSD) that organizes the annual “Bandera Readings” under the leadership of his old friend, Yuriy Syrotiuk. The USSD team has other links to the far-right Svoboda party and the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, for example Bohdan Halayko, who heads the Central Interregional Department of the UINM. In 2019, Tylischak and Halayko celebrated the 65th anniversary of “The Way to Victory” at the OUN-B headquarters in Kyiv.

• Leontiy Shipilov and Yuriy Yuzych were both “experts” for the Reanimation Package of Reforms Coalition, the “largest and most visible reform network” in Ukraine since 2014, which was infiltrated by Banderites from the start. Shipilov is evidently an OUN-B member, but I’m not so sure about Yuzych. More about them in a future installment of this series.

Yuzych recorded a lecture for the UINM to commemorate the anniversary. Meanwhile, the far-right Kholodny Yar Historical Club, which works with the neo-Nazi publisher Marko Melnyk, organized a memorial concert at the relatively prestigious National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (NaUKMA). Viktor Roh and Yuriy Syrotiuk are members of the Kholodny Yar Historical Club, and Roh is on the editorial board of its newspaper. One event poster prominently featured the neo-Nazi symbol of the Azov movement.

Speakers included Serhiy Kvit, an important OUN-B member and president of NaUKMA who led the Ministry of Education (2014-16); Roman Koval, the head of the Kholodny Yar Historical Club; and Yuriy Yuzych, who worked with Koval to compile a huge collection of Mikhnovsky texts for the Marko Melnyk Publishing House. In 2021, a special edition of this 944-page book featured a Clockwork Orange-inspired cover from the neo-Nazi brand SvaStone, which made a similar shirt that says “READY FOR A BIT OF THE OLD UKRO VIOLENCE.”

Roman Koval, friend of the Banderites, at the site of Mikhnovsky’s grave, July 2024. This summer, someone destroyed the QR-coded tombstone, sponsored by the Kholodny Yar Historical and Marko Melnyk Publishing House.

In mid-April 2023, Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov told ABC News that “the moment has come for this country [Russia] to collapse,” and the OUN-B announced the revival of the ABN as the “Anti-Imperial Bloc of Nations.” Meanwhile, Foreign Policy published an article that warned, “talk of Russian disintegration in Western capitals could raise nationalistic fervor and make Russians rally behind Putin.”

Oleh Medunytsia, predicting that “our activities within the ABN will lead to the collapse of Russia,” embarked for the United States, to tour the Ukrainian American community as the new OUN-B leader, and participate in the next “PostRussia Forum,” which took place over four days in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York City. The Hudson Institute, the home of Trump’s former CIA director, hosted the DC portion of the event. In Manhattan, the OUN-B leader made the final speech of the conference (about reviving the ABN), and sat on a panel next to Austrian Twitter sensation Gunther Fehlinger, a clownish advocate for expanding NATO and dismembering Russia, China, and BRICS.

While Medunytsia completed his trip to the United States, the OUN-B organized a briefing at the Ukraine Crisis Media Center to kick off an “information-advocacy campaign” for the creation of a new holiday on May 23, the day that OUN founder Yevhen Konovalets was assassinated in 1938. The OUN-B founded the “Day of Heroes” in 1941, but it has never been enshrined at the state level.

Leontiy Shipilov wrote the official petition, which fell far short of the 25,000 digital signatures required to get a response from the presidential administration. Shipilov is apparently an OUN-B member, perhaps still a professor at NaUKMA, and formerly an official in the Security Service of Ukraine who more recently served on the Central Election Commission. Despite embodying the will of the nation, the Banderites collected less than 4,000 signatures.

Andriy Kovalov, a panelist at the “Day of Heroes” UCMC briefing, later became a spokesman for the General Staff of the Ukrainian armed forces. Kovalov probably isn’t an OUN-B member, but belongs to the Kholodny Yar Historical Club.

The day before Medunytsia returned to Ukraine, on the symbolic date of May 9, the Banderites held a book launch event at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy for Janusz Bugajski of the Jamestown Foundation. “The Arc,” an online journal founded by OUN-B members (Ulana and Marko Suprun), published a Ukrainian translation of Bugajski’s Failed State. Deputy OUN-B leader Andriy Levus, the chief coordinator of the “Capitulation Resistance Movement,” appears to have attended the event with Ostap Kryvdyk, the former “International Secretary” of the “Resistance Movement.”

Levus and Kryvdyk, longtime assistants to far-right politician Andriy Parubiy, used to run an OUN-B front called the “Ukrainian Strategic Initiative” with Oleh Medunytsia and Borys Potapenko from Michigan. Among other things, they arranged annual trips to Ukraine for Republican think tankers that tend to speak at conferences in Washington organized by Banderite leaders of the aforementioned “ODFFU, Inc.” In September 2022, about a week after the “PostRussia Forum” got its new name, the Ukrainian Strategic Initiative officially joined Kyiv-Mohyla Academy under the leadership of Ostap Kryvdyk, who is not necessarily an OUN-B member. This NaUKMA think tank, which originated in an OUN-B front, even has a “PostRussia department,” led by another Banderite coordinator of the Capitulation Resistance Movement, who addressed the European Congress of Ukrainians this year.

OUN-B leader Oleh Medunytsia made it back just in time for another 150th anniversary Mikhnovsky memorial concert at the Lviv National Philharmonic Hall, which was organized by the Stepan Bandera National Revival Center. Medunytsia delivered the opening speech, followed by OUN-B newspaper editor Viktor Roh. Among the performers was Sofiya Fedyna, a nationalist member of parliament from the European Solidarity party. In 2019, Fedyna faced criminal charges after Zelensky made a tense visit to the frontline and she suggested that someone might kill the new president with a grenade.

To announce Ukraine’s much hyped 2023 counteroffensive, the commander-in-chief, Valerii Zaluzhny, released a high-quality propaganda video starring the Svoboda Battalion in an elite brigade of the National Guard. “The time has come to take back what belongs to us,” he captioned the video in late May. The OUN-B has at least two highly placed members in the far-right Svoboda party which created this unit. The head of political education is Yuriy Syrotiuk, and the chief ideologist is Oleksandr Sych, a former director of the Stepan Bandera National Revival Center.

As of this year, Syrotiuk is a vice president of the ABN. In 2015, he participated in clashes outside of the Ukrainian parliament building, and was arrested for “participating in mass disorder” after someone threw a grenade which killed several police officers and wounded “more than 140 people.” At that point, Svoboda was determined to stop parliament from granting autonomy to Donbass separatists as part of the Minsk peace process. Last year, Syrotiuk posed with the OUN-B newspaper as a grenade launcher operator in the 5th Assault Brigade. “The Irreversible Liquidation of the Russia Empire Has Begun,” or so he says, but what happens when Kyiv stops entertaining this fantasy?

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Next up in this series: more about Ukraine’s efforts to bring the war to Russia and sustain delusions of victory. If you want to support my work, you can “Buy Me a Coffee.”