Marketing the 'Resistance Movement'
Marketing the 'Resistance Movement'
OUN-B and the 'Capitulation Resistance Movement' (Part 2)
Click here for Part One: “Bandera’s ‘Insurgency-in-Waiting’”
INTRODUCTION: An obscure Ukrainian band made international headlines in March after receiving the blessings of The Clash to rewrite the song “London Calling.” Left-wing English singer Billy Bragg at first shared “Kyiv Calling” on social media, but deleted the post and made a new one after he saw the following photo of the band showing off Banderite t-shirts spoofing The Ramones.
“This is deeply troubling,” Bragg said, explaining that Stepan Bandera (1909-59) was a Nazi collaborator who became the hero of far-right Ukrainian nationalists. “The knock on effect of this has been to allow Putin to smear all those who want a democratic Ukraine, free from Russian influence as neo-nazis.” Bragg later deleted this post after talking with the band and helping them write a statement “that both apologised for the offence caused by the shirts and clarified the band’s position.” In fact, “Kyiv Calling” served the purpose of raising money for the “Free Ukraine Resistance Movement,” which is essentially a front for the OUN-B, or Bandera’s wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. If that is news to you, then you still need to read the first installment of this series.
There hasn’t been a lot of acknowledgment of the FURM or its predecessor in the digital Anglosphere. In its early days of 2019, the “Capitulation Resistance Movement” (Rukh Oporu Kapitulyatsiyi, ROK) called itself a “public supra-party movement,” whereas the OUN-B is a self-described “global supra-party structure.” Gordon Hahn, a political scientist, wrote that the ROK “consists of various ultra-nationalist groups.” Katharine Quinn-Judge, a former senior analyst for the International Crisis Group in Kyiv, once said the “Movement to Resist Capitulation” (a more literal translation of ROK) represented “a loose coalition of hard-liners supported by Poroshenko, some of whose associates have taken credit for stopping Zelensky’s early efforts to disengage Ukrainian forces on the frontline.”
In Part One, we heard from journalist Leonid Ragozin that the “Resistance to Capitulation Movement” was “a radical street force dedicating to toppling Zelenskiy” and “a paramilitary force associated with the nationalist opposition that coalesced around former president Petro Poroshenko.” Now compare that to the earlier descriptions to come from the Atlantic Council (AC), which is among the most influential think tanks in Washington. The “UkraineAlert” blog published by the AC Eurasia Center has described the “ROK Movement to Resist Capitulation” as “a democratic movement made up of distinguished diplomats and experts.” Weeks earlier, the AC’s Digital Forensic Research Lab similarly (mis)characterized the “Capitulation Resistance Movement” as “a diverse array of volunteers, diplomats, civil activists, scientists, and other actors.”
This installment will help to explain the discrepancy, but the short answer is that the “Resistance Movement” suggested to interested “foreign partners” that it was governed by its Strategic Council. This more respectable group of advisors is displayed on the ROK website instead of the far-right Coordination Council, roughly 50% of which consists of people involved in an OUN-B front group. More on the ROK leadership in Part 3 of this series. For now, we’ll look at the Banderite-led campaigns to promote the “Resistance Movement” in the West.
PUBLIC RELATIONS
In early 2019, a college-bound OUN-B member joined the secretariat of the Youth Nationalist Congress (Molodizhnyy Natsionalistychnyy Konhres, MNK) in Ukraine as its information and propaganda officer. Olya Sydii directed the MNK’s information center for nine months before the International Research and Exchanges Board rated the militant OUN-B front as one of the most influential youth organizations on social media in Ukraine.
By the time that report was published, Sydii had started college, and directed the media department of the Capitulation Resistance Movement in addition to the Free People production team and MNK information center. At some point Sydii also took over Free People’s Youtube channel. It became an ROK channel when she renamed it “Resistance TV.”
Olya Sydii joined the MNK in high school. She spent her senior year in Arkansas City, Kansas as part of the Future Leaders Exchange (FLEX) Program, a “competitive, merit-based scholarship funded by the U.S. Department of State” and administered by the American Councils for International Education. “Thanks American Council for the best mentoring program anyone can imagine,” Sydii once said. A month later, she led a mock funeral in Kyiv alongside far-right activists in Kyiv.
While applying for her FLEX scholarship, Sydii announced on Facebook that she played a “Yid” in the MNK’s annual “Insurgent Vertep,” or 1940s Banderite-themed antisemitic Christmas play. According to the script, she and her husband “Yid Moshko” would have thrown themselves at Stalin’s feet soon after Banderite insurgents pushed Moshko to the ground with a prop machine gun.
A year later, Sydii was taking propaganda photos around Washington, holding up the MNK’s emblem with the words “Ukraine Above All!” in front of US monuments. The organization’s symbol is a hybrid lion-wolf-hedgehog beast invented by Dmytro Dontsov, the fascist godfather of extreme Ukrainian nationalism. The hedgehog represents intransigence, and the refusal to compromise. In Washington, Sydii met, in her words, “the US representative who deals with the affairs of Ukraine, its improvement, etc”—an aide to Donald Trump’s Special Envoy for Ukraine, an opponent of the Minsk peace process.
As the Capitulation Resistance Movement got started, Sydii joined a mentoring program for FLEX alumni. Less than a month before the ROK officially launched, she participated in some kind of USAID event for Ukrainian youth organizers. The U.S. Agency for International Development has long been accused of being a CIA front. Earlier that summer, the MNK’s head of design, who presumably reported to Sydii, started working as a project director for a USAID-funded youth program. According to his Facebook profile, the ROK spokesperson graduated from this same program, and in June 2018, changed the setting of his profile picture from a far-right (Azov National Corps) protest to an event sponsored by the USAID.
The MNK used to be a member of the Reanimation Package of Reforms (RPR) Coalition, a USAID-funded group of Ukrainian civil society organizations that co-organized the high-level annual Ukraine Reform Conference. The OUN-B affiliated Center for Research of the Liberation Movement (TsDVR) in Lviv is still part of the RPR Coalition, and apparently like “Free People,” also a member of the “International Council in Support of Ukraine.” The RPR Coalition’s point person on national memory policy directs the TsDVR, and its “group manager” for youth policy is Olena Podobied-Frankivska, who also used to work for the TsDVR. In 2019, she became the head of the National Ukrainian Youth Association, a newly formed coalition of “patriotic” groups including the far-right MNK, the leader of which joined as a founding board member.
By early 2020, the Capitulation Resistance Movement had a website. About half of its webpages remained hidden, many of them still being drafted and mostly dedicated to other entities, all of which pointed to OUN-B: Free People, the “Free People Course,” MNK, the Ternopil branch of MNK that kickstarted “Protect Ukraine,” the OUN-B newspaper “Way of Victory,” two MNK camps (“Insurgent Fire,” held in memory of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and “Kolovrat,” as in a Slavic swastika), and three martyred MNK members. The latter included a template page reserved for a tribute to the modern “godfather” of the Youth Nationalist Congress.
The ROK website was presumably designed by Sergiy Repik, a member of the ROK Coordination Council who provided the same service for the MNK, Free People, and the OUN-B’s Ukrainian Publishing Union. In early 2021, Repik became the MNK’s new leader, but more about him later. The ROK website was never finished. FreeUkraine.TV, the simple FURM website, is entirely in English. “JOIN THE VOICE OF UKRAINIAN RESISTANCE,” it says at the top of the homepage. “We are the national decentralized citizen-led movement dedicated to the reoccupation and restoration of Ukraine following Russia’s invasion.” According to the About Us page, written at the start of the war:
If the Ukrainian government should fall, we will lead resistance to Russian occupation… Founded by the leaders of the Maidan Self-Defense group back in 2014, we are now a nation-wide resistance movement operating [in] almost all regions of Ukraine… We’ve literally ruined Putin’s plans to ruin Ukraine from inside by the Russia-led agents in Ukrainian Parliament active at that time. We knew that Putin would not stop. This is why even months before the full invasion we’ve already started to mobilise and train people for all levels of resistance… We are linked to a network of diaspora partners across Canada, USA, Australia, UK, Germany, Poland, Spain, Portugal, and Argentina of around 5000 people…
This statement has led some to suggest that the FURM is a “partisan outfit” which has “taken out arms depots and killed collaborators” inside Russian-occupied territory. The “network of diaspora partners” could be a reference to the Ukrainian World Congress, or perhaps more likely the OUN-B coordinating body known as the “International Council in Support of Ukraine” (ICSU), which the MNK front “Free People” joined in 2018. (To recap, “Free People” is essentially the political wing of MNK, and in turn the OUN-B. The ICSU is the international coordinating body of OUN-B “facade structures.”) The above paragraph was probably authored by Ostap Kryvdyk, a British-educated senior foreign policy advisor to far-right politician Andriy Parubiy.
It’s possible that Kryvdyk believes there are “around 5000” OUN-B members in the diaspora. If so, and the number sounds unrealistically high, it could be an inflated number he heard from the Bandera cultists. Ostap Kryvdyk is the “International Secretary” of the Free Ukraine Resistance Movement. According to LinkedIn, he had the same role in the Maidan Self-Defense, led by Parubiy, the former commander of a neo-Nazi paramilitary organization. Earlier in 2013, Kryvdyk performed similar duties for the Euronastup (“Euro Offensive”) campaign covered in Part One of this series.
After the so-called “Revolution of Dignity,” Ostap Kryvdyk advised Parubiy as the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council. Kryvdyk later advised Parubiy as the first deputy chair (2014-16) and then chairman (2016-19) of Ukrainian parliament. Ostap Kryvdyk acted as Parubiy’s translator when they travelled to the United States and Canada in those years, often on trips arranged and accompanied by the Banderite ICSU leader Borys Potapenko.
Kryvdyk and Parubiy visited the US headquarters of OUN-B in 2015. Eventually, Ostap Kryvdyk became an analyst for the “Ukrainian Strategic Initiative,” an OUN-B front chaired by the future leader of the “Resistance Movement.” In the meantime, apparently while still “managing foreign policy priorities” for Parubiy, Kryvdyk earned a master’s degree in international relations in 2017-18. He completed a program run by King’s College London for members of the Royal College of Defense Studies, the most prestigious component of the UK’s Defense Academy. On Twitter, Kryvdyk describes himself as a “professional revolutionary (twice)” and “RCDS [Royal College of Defense Studies] Member.”
Kryvdyk probably hasn’t joined the OUN-B, but he has certainly become a good friend of the “Bandera Lobby.” After “Kyiv Calling” went semi-viral, Kryvdyk sat with the band members during their media interviews. He appeared on CNN, and many articles quoted him as saying, “We want ‘Kyiv Calling’ to be the symbol of resistance to the new aggressor in Europe. No surrender. No compromise peace.”
Olya Sydii is the head of video production for Free People. The “Kyiv Calling” music video wasn’t uploaded to “Resistance TV” but a new “Free Ukraine Resistance Channel,” which the following month began to look for an “assistant, community manager” and a “videographer / blogger.” According to the second job listing, “We are creating a citizen journalism channel… which will help to attract support [for the ‘Resistance Movement’] both before the war ends and later during the rebuilding process.” Salaries would be paid for by “a large community of caring people from around the world.”
The second job listing also boasted an impressive “partner media network abroad to disseminate content.” For “Kyiv Calling,” the Free Ukraine Resistance Movement hired Borkowski, a PR agency in London, “to secure high-profile news and music media coverage that would highlight the FURM cause.” The agency has touted this as one of their success stories, citing “over 1,000 items of media coverage that drove over 500k people to watch the music video in just 24 hours.” Amidst the flood of nearly identical stories, The Guardian and other sources reported that money raised by the “war anthem” would help the FURM “lobby for international support.”
“Kyiv Calling” inspired Michael Weiss to remind his Twitter followers that he had recently interviewed the “second in command” of the FURM battalion, which he described as an “insurgency-in-waiting.” Weiss, the neocon news director of New Lines Magazine, apparently doesn’t know that he spoke to Ashot Topchian, a member of Free People. “Call me Anton,” Topchian told Weiss.
The voice on the other end of my Signal chat speaks fluent English, with an accent tinctured slightly by a Western education, which I’m soon to discover isn’t just any Western education. Anton spent a year at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, Britain’s West Point. He retired as a major in the Ukrainian army in the 1990s. He sounds as if he’s in his 50s, although I don’t press him on this detail because the less Anton says about himself — even over a supposedly encrypted platform — the better. His bona fides were vouched for by an active-duty U.S. lieutenant colonel who was recently in Kyiv and was impressed by Anton’s depth of knowledge and Rolodex of high-level military contacts…
Has any third party or foreign country helped with supporting the Resistance Movement? “Not yet,” Anton insists, although he is hoping to change that. His organization addressed a letter to a top Ukrainian official urging him to ask U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, as well as CIA Director William Burns and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, to help support his guerrilla battalion. “At the moment we have only materials sent from the West, but no Western instructors on the ground. We’ve been in communication with retired SAS [British special forces] and former U.S. military guys, but they’re not deployed here”… The Resistance Movement, the U.S. lieutenant colonel who introduced me to Anton explains, may not be first in line to receive such largesse owing to its domestic political baggage. It used to be known as the Capitulation Resistance Movement…
Days later, FURM leader Andriy Levus gave an online briefing to Chatham House, a prominent British think tank. The webinar was hosted by Orysia Lutsevych, former executive director of the western-funded Open Ukraine Foundation, which was founded by Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the former prime minister (2014-16) whose political party embraced “Free People” in 2016. Lutsevych is also a member of the Foreign Policy Council of the Ukrainian World Congress (UWC), which partnered with the “Resistance Movement.” For their Chatham House audience, Lutsevych introduced Levus as an “excellent panelist” tuning in from Kyiv, “where he is leading the civic resistance, jointly with the Ukrainian armed forces…”
THE CANADA CONNECTION
Less than a month after the October 2019 launch of the Capitulation Resistance Movement, the Banderites promoted their anti-Zelensky campaign at the twenty sixth triennial Congress of Ukrainian Canadians. They distributed pamphlets on the ROK at tables set up for the OUN-B’s League of Ukrainian Canadians (LUC) and the BCU Foundation, which is the charitable arm of the LUC-dominated Buduchnist Credit Union (BCU) Financial Group. The BCU is the largest Ukrainian financial institution in Canada, and underpins the Canadian OUN-B network. It is presumably still partnered with the International Council in Support of Ukraine. The Friends of Ukraine Defense Forces Fund, the ICSU-affiliated group of “activist fundraisers” mentioned in Part 1 for supporting “Free People,” is controlled by the OUN-B affiliated board members of the BCU Foundation.
The LUC delegation at the Congress included Martyn Stusiak, a member of the Youth Nationalist Congress who led the MNK in his hometown of Stryi in western Ukraine before moving to Alberta. He posted the following Facebook update: “Waiting for Resolution supporting Рух Опору Капітуляції [ROK]…” Either the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) watered down this resolution, or the Banderites never aimed for an official endorsement. The UCC unanimously adopted the LUC’s resolution on maintaining the “Territorial Integrity of Ukraine,” including a preamble which said that the UCC “recognizes the worries of concession by large sectors of Ukrainian society represented by broad movements such as the Capitulation Resistance Movement.” This laid the groundwork for the UCC to partner with the “Free Ukraine Resistance Movement” in 2022.
The Canadian OUN-B periodically promoted the ROK on ForumTV, the Banderite news program on “Canada’s only multilingual and multicultural television broadcaster.” In 2019-21, Steve Bandera, a third-generation OUN-B member and the Canadian grandson of you-know-who, served as the managing director of ForumTV. In that period they aired numerous interviews with leaders of the ROK. The Banderite-run Buduchnist Credit Union is the chief sponsor of ForumTV. About ten years ago, a Ukrainian Canadian blog (UkrCdn.com) reviewed the first episode:
Forum TV’s credits reveal its new leaders are not people with much expertise in media but rather members of the Buduchnist board that fund the program. The show’s Executive Producer is the Chair of the Board of Directors for the Buduchnist, another producer is also on the board and the associate producer is the President of Canadian Friends of Ukraine. All have impressive resumes in their own regards according to their LinkedIn profiles, but nothing about any sort of experience running a television show.
Days after the 2019 Congress of Ukrainian Canadians, the League of Ukrainian Canadians and BCU Financial Group sponsored the first ever book launch event for Nolan Peterson, a former US Air Force pilot turned conflict journalist based in Ukraine. Peterson is the senior editor of Coffee or Die Magazine, a military news website published by the right-wing Black Rifle Coffee Company. Ihor Kozak, a board member of the LUC and the BCU Financial Group (vice chair) who co-founded the Friends of Ukraine Defense Forces Fund, interviewed Peterson for ForumTV. After giving the conservative coffee company journalist a chance to promote his book, Kozak moved on to what he wanted to discuss.
Nolan, I’ve been following you closely, as I mentioned before, and I saw some of the latest reporting you did from Ukraine, over the past month or so, has been related to mass rallies that have been taking place in Kyiv and also across Ukraine, west to east, and the rallies were to warn President Zelensky and the new government against crossing the so-called “red lines.” The rallies were conducted under the banners — are being conducted under the banners — of the Capitulation Resistance Movement. Can you please provide your comments, your thoughts, on this movement? What does it mean to Ukraine, to the free world, to the conflict in itself?
Ihor Kozak was the first Soviet immigrant accepted into the elite Royal Military College of Canada. He apparently spent more than a decade in the Canadian armed forces working as an aerospace engineer. Kozak has been described as a “retired Canadian NATO officer” and “an independent defense and security consultant” who “advises legislative bodies and governments pro-bono, as well as think tanks and media in Canada, the United States, and Ukraine on the Russia-Ukraine conflict.” He is the token Soviet-born Ukrainian among the leaders of the Canadian OUN-B network.
In February 2020, the League of Ukrainian Canadians held its triennial congress, and adopted resolutions calling for closer cooperation with the Youth Nationalist Congress, Free People, the Capitulation Resistance Movement, and the Ukrainian Strategic Initiative, an OUN-B affiliated think tank. Andriy Levus, the leader of the “Resistance Movement,” in addition to Borys Potapenko, the Michigander president of the International Council in Support of Ukraine, sat front and center in the group photo taken at the LUC congress.
The event took place at the Old Mill Toronto, a self-described “historic, boutique hotel nestled by the Humber River,” same as the Nolan Peterson book launch. The venue’s CEO is a board member of BCU Financial Group — and so was her predecessor, a former executive producer of ForumTV. The hotel’s controller is also a BCU board member, as well as the treasurer of the Etobicoke branch of the OUN-B affiliated Ukrainian Youth Association in Canada. Ihor Kozak is also a board member of the hotel, which the Banderites have made their premier North American venue.
To conclude the 2020 LUC congress, the Old Mill Toronto hosted a Banderite gala attended by ROK coordinator Andriy Levus and leaders of the Conservative Party, including former prime minister Stephen Harper, who posed for pictures with Levus and numerous other OUN-B members. Borys Potapenko presented an award to Harper on behalf of the International Council in Support of Ukraine, an OUN-B coordinating body. It was also at the Old Mill Toronto that a delegation of MNK members representing Free People presented their “Stop Revanche” campaign to Conservative politicians, a year before the launch of the “Resistance Movement,” and just as Free People officially joined the ICSU. The U.S. leader of the “Bandera Lobby” didn’t miss either chance to rub shoulders with Canadian politicians.
THE BANDERA LOBBY
In September 2019, there was a celebration of the “125th Anniversary of the Organized Ukrainian-American Community” at the Princeton Club of New York. Walter Zaryckyj, the US leader of OUN-B and executive director of the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations, organized the event and delivered the opening remarks. CUSUR grew out of the Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation, another OUN-B “facade structure” led by Zaryckyj. Herman Pirchner of the American Foreign Policy Council gave the keynote speech. “In short, you’ve been successful for 125 years because you’re Ukrainians,” Pirchner told his audience. “Other ethnicities in the United States that have similar opportunities simply were not able to do the same thing…”
One week later, the OUN-B organized a dubious “extraordinary convention” in Bloomingdale, Illinois to declare a new leadership of the Organization for Defense of the Four Freedoms for Ukraine (ODFFU) and its Banderite headquarters building in Manhattan. The ODFFU, founded in 1946, is the U.S. counterpart of the League of Ukrainian Canadians, but the OUN-B evidently lost control of this group in the past decade. The “old board” of ODFFU denounced the “extraordinary convention” as a “coup d’etat” by “rogue members,” but “it had to be done” according to the international leadership of OUN-B. The meeting in Bloomingdale installed Mykola Hryckowian as the new president of ODFFU, although he had allegedly been expelled from this organization for stealing from the Christmas caroling fund.
Hryckowian heads the “Washington bureau” of the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations (CUSUR), which is perhaps more like the Ukrainian bureau of Herman Pirchner’s think tank. The American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC) is said to be the “closest” and “longest abiding partner” of the Banderite CUSUR, which has a “fully functional bureau” housed in the Washington headquarters of the neoconservative group. Pirchner, who founded the AFPC forty years ago, is a Gold Circle member of the Council for National Policy, a secretive and influential right-wing umbrella organization. In 2019, he gave a shout out to Walter Zaryckyj and Borys Potapenko in the acknowledgements section of his new book, Post Putin.
Earlier that year at CUSUR’s tenth annual “U.S.-Ukraine Security Dialogue” roundtable event, Walter Zaryckyj introduced Herman Pirchner as “my dearest and oldest friend here in Washington.” Pirchner then introduced two panel speakers from Free People, including Andriy Levus as someone “who we’ve all known a long time.” (Their discussion topic: “Assessing the Security/Diplomatic Impact of Russian Hybrid Warfare in Ukraine.”) As Pirchner explained, “My first time walking through Maidan was with Levus as a guide,” during the AFPC’s first annual trip to Ukraine. By then, Hryckowian’s son started an internship at the AFPC, in which capacity he “prepared materials for a Department of Defense briefing, a Congressional testimony, and a senior level delegation to Ukraine.”
Since 2015, Herman Pirchner and the AFPC have led an annual delegation of Republican think tankers and former government officials to Ukraine, accompanied by Mykola Hryckowian (CUSUR) and/or Borys Potapenko (ICSU). The latter has apparently organized the fact-finding missions with the leadership of CUSUR and AFPC. Each time, the delegations have been received and guided in Ukraine by members of Free People, and eventually on behalf of the OUN-B’s “Ukrainian Strategic Initiative.” In 2021, the Republican delegation met with the “Strategic Council” of the Capitulation Resistance Movement.
With connections made and experiences shared in Ukraine, conservative think tankers have welcomed visiting representatives of Free People with open arms in Washington. In 2018, Andriy Levus and Borys Potapenko co-authored an article that appeared in the AFPC’s “Defense Dossier” immediately after an article by Nolan Peterson. The following month, the executive director of the House Freedom Caucus joined that year’s trip to Ukraine. Soon, the “Ukrainian Strategic Initiative” sent its first delegation to Washington, including Ashot Topchian, the future deputy commander of the “Free Ukraine Battalion.”
In September 2019, the AFPC made its annual trip to Ukraine. Among other things, the delegation observed, “Opposition political groups remain in shock and even denial about their overwhelming rejection by the voters this year in three open, free and fair national elections… Some parts of the opposition in the Rada are willing to cooperate with [Zelensky’s political party] ‘Servant of the People’ on an issue-by-issue basis, but others are not, even portraying the new president and his associates as Moscow stooges.” Later that month, Pirchner celebrated the 125th anniversary of the organized Ukrainian community with CUSUR. In the days to come, the OUN-B launched its ODFFU “coup” and the Capitulation Resistance Movement.
In mid-October, Andriy Levus said, “I have known Michael Carpenter for a long time.” Mike Carpenter, a foreign policy advisor to Joe Biden, and at that point the managing director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, spoke at a CUSUR conference the day before in Washington—and so did an advisor to the Capitulation Resistance Movement—where Carpenter described the “Steinmeier Formula” to make peace in Donbas as “the primary threat to Ukraine internally right now.” As the late Russia expert Stephen F. Cohen told journalist Aaron Maté that month, “unless the White House encourages this diplomacy, Zelensky has no chance of negotiating an end to the war. So the stakes are enormously high.”
Earlier that year, Michael Carpenter participated in the CUSUR conference at which Herman Pirchner introduced Andriy Levus, “who we’ve all known a long time.” Speaking at another CUSUR conference attended by leaders of OUN-B in 2018, Carpenter dissed the “ultra uber cautious Obama administration that was—members of which were afraid of their own shadow.” Amidst the 2020 presidential campaign, Carpenter predicted that a Biden administration would sharply increase military aid to Kyiv, and “help Ukraine beat back this—growing, by the way—Russian covert influence within its politics.” Once Joe Biden took office, Kyiv initiated an unprecedented crackdown on “Russian covert influence,” and Vladimir Putin subsequently began to assemble troops on the border. Whether or not the “Resistance Movement” received support from Washington, London, or Ottawa, the OUN-B helped slam shut the window for peace that Volodymyr Zelensky opened in 2019.