Memory Warriors Convene in New York
Banderite conference on "RU-UA Memory Wars in Western Academia and Media"
This could be considered part of an ongoing series on Banderite memory warriors.
INTRODUCTION
I recently staged a subdued and lonely protest outside of a mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The Harry F. Sinclair House, located nearby the Metropolitan Museum of Art and better known as the Ukrainian Institute of America, hosted yet another “special event” by the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations (CUSUR): “Russian-Ukrainian Memory Wars in Western Academia and Media.”
As readers of the Bandera Lobby Blog know, CUSUR is an important “facade structure” for the OUN-B, or Banderite faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which appears to be losing control of its US headquarters building in Manhattan’s Ukrainian East Village. As always, this conference was organized by Walter A. Zaryckyj, or “WAZ,” the executive director of CUSUR and president of the Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation, which is the financial arm of OUN-B in the United States.
My sign said: “CUSUR is a front for the OUN-B.” The other side had QR codes linking to my found footage documentary, “WAZ and the Magic Circle,” and more information about the upcoming jungeWelt conference in Berlin to shine light on the “Bandera Complex.” Occasionally men in lederhosen walked past to and from the adjacent German-American Steuben Parade on the east side of Central Park that happened to be taking place on Rosh Hashanah.
I hoped to get the attention of the small number of prominent non-Banderites that participated in the conference, such as Lubomyr Hajda, who retired from the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute in 2018 after decades of playing a key role. Of the 15-20 people (including speakers) that showed up to this event, only a few Banderites talked to me. I wondered if my “protest” was meaningless. However, after failing to convince police guarding the parade that a dangerous pro-Russian propagandist was harassing his event-goers, Zaryckyj helped to raise awareness of my cause by naming me in his opening and closing words at the conference.
Kathy Nalywajko, the president of the Ukrainian Institute of America, is not a Banderite, but a “career wealth advisor” and managing director of MAI Capital Management, which is reportedly worth $17 billion. Nalywajko was scheduled to deliver the words of welcome, instead Zaryckyj did the honors. As of ten years ago, according to the PhD thesis of political economist Yuliya Yurchenko, “The US capital in Ukraine is represented by three lobby and interest groups — the American Chamber of Commerce … the US-Ukraine Business Council, and the Centre for US-Ukraine Relations.” Walter Zaryckyj has described CUSUR as a “think tank,” which has especially close ties to the neoconservative American Foreign Policy Council in Washington.
Laying the ground rules for the event, Walter Zaryckyj advised members of the audience to limit their questions to one minute each. “If you need to, we can have you interviewed by Robeson outside,” he joked, then began mumbling incoherently. “Just kidding, just kidding.” Moving on, Zaryckyj introduced the first speaker, Ostap Kryvdyk, who joined the event from Kyiv via Zoom. “I don’t think I’ll be revealing much,” the US Banderite leader said, “but he will in fact have a pretty high post in the next couple of months.”
Kryvdyk, a self-described “professional revolutionary,” has been an influential friend of OUN-B and important assistant to far-right Ukrainian politician Andriy Parubiy. More will be coming soon(ish) on the Bandera Lobby Blog about Kryvdyk’s role as “International Secretary” of the Banderite-led “Capitulation Resistance Movement.” He had the same job in the “Maidan Self-Defense” that provided muscle for the so-called “Revolutionary of Dignity” in early 2014.
In his official “First Word on the Matter” for CUSUR, Ostap Kryvdyk complained about the BBC’s report from Kyiv in February 2014 about the “Neo-Nazi threat in new Ukraine.” He then explained, “there is a very close connection between experts and the policymakers, military, and special services, who ask the questions,” and sometimes it all “gets back into deeper questions on Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis.” Soon thereafter he lamented that the “so-called balance in western media is a quite popular way for Russian narratives like Mr. Putin’s to be brought through Ivan Katchanovski’s words.”
Katchanovski is an important Ukrainian Canadian scholar often smeared by Ukrainian nationalists and “pro-Ukraine” information warriors. He has three(!) books on Ukraine due to be published next year, including Maidan Massacre in Ukraine and From the Maidan to the Russia-Ukraine War. Katchanovski is probably best known for his work on the Maidan massacre of February 2014, but he has also written numerous essays about contemporary memory politics in Ukraine, and the role of the Ukrainian Nationalist movement in the Holocaust.
In conclusion, Kryvdyk misquoted George H.W. Bush’s infamous “Chicken Kiev” speech to the Soviet Ukrainian parliament in August 1991: “The United States will never support suicidal nationalism, and we fully support democratic Soviet Union.” (What Bush Sr. actually said: “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.”) Predicting the collapse of the “Russian empire,” Kryvdyk advised, “it is high time to get rid of Chicken Kiev thinking in the global and specifically in Western academia and media.”
The first panel discussion (“RU-UA Memory Wars in the Realms of Research, Education and Scholarship”) included six people. Zaryckyj introduced the discussion leader Lubomyr Hajda as “one of the longest serving veterans of the memory wars that I know.” At these CUSUR events, Zaryckyj always plays the gracious host, showering praise on his perfect speakers, who in turn thank him for his very kind introductions. “I think you’re the best suited to actually run this session, cuz you’ve been there for a long, long time, and Harvard was a real battleground.”
Chuckling, WAZ said, “I know that the Russians did accuse you at some point of being involved with… apparently a 50s [CIA] operation that dealt with the Ukrainian nationalists who were supposed to have infiltrated Harvard.” Hajda similarly introduced himself in jest as someone who was once accused of “being a member of that group of Nazi collaborators that were brought [to the US] after World War II by the CIA to infiltrate American universities.” Ha, ha, ha …
The first speaker from the panel was Ukrainian British historian Myroslav Shkandrij, author of the book, In the Maelstrom: the Waffen-SS ‘Galicia’ Division and Its Legacy, which was published earlier this year. Shkandrij did not mention the SS Galicia in his lecture, but after criticizing the Russophilic “matrix” of Western academia during the Cold War, he said, “we can now understand how Putin’s propagandists try to shoehorn academic discussions into this kind of framework,”
by emphasizing certain moments in history, by using certain terms, all designed to produce a negative attitude towards the Ukrainian past: pogroms, nationalists, OUN, UPA, Azov, Nazis, fascists. One does not have to look far to see how Western academics swallowed this narrative… Stephen Cohen was shown on TV wagging his finger and warning of imminent ethnic strife and bloodshed. Even during the year of Maidan revolution, the Russian invasion of Crimea and Donbas, articles kept appearing on fascism in Ukraine, Nazi symbols in Ukraine, antisemitism, and of course a divided country.
Moments later, Shkandrij named “John Mearsheimer and the realists,” who are increasingly vindicated every day, and singled out “Noam Chomsky’s unrelenting anti-Americanism.” According to Shkandrij, Western academics have denied Ukrainians agency by talking about the conflict as a proxy war, but apparently they have no agency to arrive at these conclusions independently. Instead, they have “swallowed this narrative” from “Putin’s propagandists.”
These ideas from both right and left dismiss the idea of Ukraine as an independent political player. In their view, [Ukraine] is merely a pawn in a great game being played between major powers, and this comes up in discussions even among my students, constantly. Such commentaries are hostage, in my view, to the Russian imperialist view…[!]
Myroslav Shkandrij, a visiting professor of history at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, was one of the most distinguished speakers. The rest of the first panel discussion included rather boring lectures by Olga Bertelsen (Tiffin University, Ohio), Mark Thomas (La Salle University, Philadelphia), Kateryna Shynkaruk (Texas A&M University), and Anna Procyk (Kingsborough Community College, Brooklyn). Procyk, allegedly a fierce defender of the Nationalist movement who received her PhD from Columbia in 1973, is a former executive of the OUN-B front group for Ukrainian American women.
Bertelsen, a former research fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, has in recent years cited Holocaust deniers to clear the name of Ivan Demjanjuk, the infamous Ukrainian Nazi death camp guard. According to historian Per Rudling, on page 296 of Shkandrij’s latest book, he also “insinuates that the convicted Sobibor death camp guard Ivan Demjanjuk (1920-2012) was framed by the German courts on the basis of ‘forged documents.’ Remarkably, considering that the study is published by a reputable academic publisher, Shkandrij lends credence to the evidently false claims of notorious Holocaust deniers in the Journal of Historical Review, which, Shkandrij maintains has ‘convinced some researchers that Demjanjuk was neither at Sobibor nor at Trawniki’.”
Irene Jarosewich, former editor of the pro-nationalist Ukrainian American newspapers Svoboda and Ukrainian Weekly, chaired the second panel discussion (“RU-UA Memory Wars in the Realms of Print Media, Broadcast Media and the Internet”). Although these publications used to be critical of OUN-B, and Jarosewich’s husband is a Jewish historian, she has apparently remained close to some prominent Banderites in the United States. Entering the Ukrainian Institute of America, she sarcastically jeered at me, something like, “Yay! Keep tracking us!” and on the way out, she shouted, “weirdo!”
The makeup of this panel was more interesting. The first speaker was Michael Bociurkiw Jr., a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, an influential think tank in Washington that is typically represented at CUSUR conferences.
In his 1989 “magic circle” lecture, Walter Zaryckyj referred to the Ukrainian Weekly’s Michael Bociurkiw Sr. as a “mamby-pamby, milquetoast Melnykite scared of his own shadow,” meaning that he was associated with the Melnykite (OUN-M) wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in the United States. Zaryckyj said this to underline the threat posed by the Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations (OSI) in the U.S. Department of Justice, which took issue with Bociurkiw’s role in the far-right campaign against this government agency. “They’ve got files on all our people, there’s got to be something wrong with this!” declared WAZ.
Bociurkiw Jr. mostly spoke about the war. “I don’t want to sound too negative about things,” he said, suggesting that Ukraine has not repelled Russian forces because the West has not sent enough weapons to Kyiv and instead let Moscow have “escalatory dominance.” (Who could have seen this coming? Robert Kagan, the famous neocon married to Victoria Nuland, the acting Deputy Secretary of State, once summarized Barack Obama’s view on Ukraine thusly: “it means more to them [Russia] than it means to us and therefore we shouldn’t escalate in a situation like that.”) Spoken like a true Washington think tanker, Bocirukiw told the CUSUR audience, “what makes this war global is that whatever happens in Ukraine will dictate” whether or not China invades Taiwan. (But if you think that Ukraine is “merely a pawn in a great game being played between major powers,” then you have been duped by the “Russian imperialist view,” says Shkandrij.)
Next up was Peter Kormylo, an OUN-B leader in Scotland, and CEO of the Ukrainian Information Service in London. This OUN-B front group, like CUSUR itself, grew out of the Banderites’ international Ukrainian Central Information Service. Kormylo is also a former leader of the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain, which has been dominated by OUN-B members since the early years of the Cold War. Perhaps because Shkandrij declined to do the honors, Kormylo opted to discuss the “Galicia Division,” AKA the (Ukrainian) 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS. Both of their fathers served in this Nazi military unit.
“Where are we now?” Peter Kormylo asked. “This week, once again, our monuments have become easy targets for the distortion and falsifying information regarding Dyviziia ‘Halychyna,’ and we’re informed that the Archeparchy of Philadelphia is to cover up, quote, a ‘Nazi SS monument’…”
The monument, erected roughly 30 years ago at St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery… gained national attention last week with a report in the Philadelphia Inquirer. A report on that monument and another in Michigan had appeared in a Jewish newspaper, The Forward, last month.
Both of these reports credited yours truly for bringing attention to the cenotaph after the OUN-B leader from Ukraine, Oleh Medunytsia, posed with the monument earlier this year. “For decades, Russian agents of influence and their paid malcontents have mounted a slow-burning, but persistently constant disinformation campaign against the legacy of the Galicia Division,” alleged Kormylo. “In the UK, we are very conscious of how Kremlin-funded, so-called ‘academics’ are particularly intent on manipulating the Jewish and other communities, which at present sit on the political fence.” In other words, when Jews criticize the glorification of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators, this is the result of “psychological hacking” by the Kremlin. How’s that for denying agency?
Without naming names, the Scottish OUN-B leader took aim at Per Rudling, an impeccable professor of history at Lund University in Sweden and expert on the history of Ukrainian nationalism. Perhaps unbeknownst to Kormylo, a couple days before, the academic journal Ab Imperio published Rudling’s review of Shkandrij’s “deeply flawed book,” In the Maelstrom, which “suffers from serious problems.” (According to Per Rudling, “It is old wine in new bottles, in its uncritical reiteration of the Waffen-SS veterans’ own narration of the unit.”)
“Both the Ukrainian diaspora and the Ukrainian government cannot afford to ignore the proliferation of the crypto-war and the creeping spread of the dubious works of malicious academics,” declared Kormylo. “We should take a lead from the League of Ukrainian Canadians,” another OUN-B front group, and in particular, their “Project FACTS,” from which Kormylo lifted parts of his speech on the Galicia Division. “One example is their correspondence with a European university, drawing the faculty’s attention to the practice of a particularly malicious lecturer, who spends most of his well-sponsored time creating disinformation regarding the Galicia Division.” Here he is referring to the LUC’s efforts to silence Rudling, which was previously reported on the Bandera Lobby Blog.
Peter Kormylo wasn’t originally scheduled to participate in this event, but he evidently replaced Irena Chalupa, a Banderite formerly associated with the Atlantic Council. In 1986, they both read poetry at the funeral of OUN-B leader Yaroslav Stetsko in Munich, who led the short-lived pro-Nazi government established by the Banderites on June 30, 1941 in German-occupied western Ukraine. The next speaker, Bohdan Nahaylo, the British-Ukrainian chief editor of the Kyiv Post, is a former member of the “June 30, 1941” branch of the OUN-B affiliated Ukrainian Youth Association in Wolverhampton, England.
Nahaylo seemed to take a more subtle swipe at Per Rudling when he suggested that 18th century Cossack leader Ivan Mazepa convinced the Swedes to support Ukraine, “with some notable exceptions.” (Rudling is of course highly critical of OUN, but very pro-Ukraine.) Recalling the 1980s, when Nahaylo and many other Banderites worked for the US-funded Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), he alleged that they came under fire from “Soviet-American agents of influence” who accused them of “antisemitism, of course, or promotion of fascism, why? Because of our mentioning, recalling the restoration of Ukraine’s independence by Bandera’s followers in Lviv on June the 30th, 1941.” (!!!) Nevertheless, RFE/RL sent Nahaylo to Ukraine in June 1990, making him its first official allowed inside the USSR.
Up next was Yevhen Fedchenko, the chief editor of StopFake, which is ostensibly a Ukrainian fact-checking website, but in reality an infowar outfit, founded by the Mohyla School of Journalism at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (NaUKMA) in Kyiv. Fedchenko has openly come to the defense of the violent neo-Nazi organization “C14,” and the leadership of StopFake more or less had a meltdown in 2020 after Zaborona, an online Ukrainian media outlet, exposed their links to neo-Nazis, especially those of StopFake host Marko Suprun.
Suprun is the primary English language host of StopFake videos. He is not just a Ukrainian Canadian OUN-B member but a CUSUR board member, or at least used to be. His Ukrainian American wife, Ulana Suprun, is another bonafide Banderite and the former acting Healthcare Minister of Ukraine (2016-19), whose parents provided CUSUR with funding to “open a fully functional bureau in DC” on the premises of the American Foreign Policy Council.
Serhiy Kvit, a prominent OUN-B member and former Education Minister of Ukraine (2014-16), is the president of NaUKMA, and if I remember correctly, served on the supervisory board of StopFake. Kvit was originally scheduled to deliver the “First Word on the Matter” for CUSUR before he was substituted by Ostap Kryvdyk, who chairs a new think tank in Kyiv Mohyla Academy that grew out of yet another OUN-B “facade structure” in Ukraine which hosted annual delegations of right-wing think tankers led by the American Foreign Policy Council. Irena Chalupa, the other Banderite who didn’t make it to this event, is a producer of StopFake.
Irene Jarosewich, the discussion leader, cut off Yevhen Fedchenko because of time constraints, to praise StopFake as “the only tool in Ukraine right now that consistently fights against disinformation, and all of us having been saying that in the reconstruction period, StopFake has to be multiplied by 100.” She did not intervene to set the record straight when her panelists took aim at historian Per Rudling. Taking back the mic to move on to the final lecture, Zaryckyj apologized that he could not let this panel “go on and on, because you folks are the best in the business.”
The last speaker needed no introduction for the CUSUR audience, and neither for many Bandera Lobby Blog readers. The “Last Word on the Matter” went to Lubomyr Luciuk, a Banderite professor at the Royal Military College of Canada, who got his blog deleted from the Times of Israel website after he publicly fantasized about throwing soup at the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa. Like the Scottish OUN-B leader Peter Kormylo, he is a Fellow of the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto. Last year, Luciuk self-published a book, Operation Payback: Soviet Disinformation and Alleged Nazi War Criminals in North America, which his bio on the CUSUR program hailed an “instant classic.” This year, McGill-Queen's University Press published a book on “Soviet Counterinsurgency Operations and the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement” that Luciuk co-edited with Volodymyr Viatrovych, the OUN-B’s former “memory czar” of Ukraine.
In his lecture, Luciuk of course did not talk about the role of OUN-B and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in the Holocaust, but made sure to mention “the Soviet agents” that “disguised themselves on false-flag operations, pretended to be UPA, went in the villages, killed people, and then the UPA got blamed.” In other words, “some of the stories you hear about villages being attacked by UPA, killing people, and innocents and so on, are true, except that they weren’t really members of UPA. They were Soviets in disguise.” In fact, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army butchered countless numbers of Poles, Jews, and other “innocents and so on.”
These people are essentially Holocaust deniers. For years, historians like Per Rudling have had these Banderites increasingly flailing, and on the defensive. To hear it from Lubomyr Luciuk, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has given them “the best chance ever to tell our story… so now is the time for us to win the memory war.” Around this time, an old friend of Zaryckyj’s stepped outside to smoke several cigarettes, and among other things insisted to me that the KGB paid off John-Paul Himka, the leading historian who wrote Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust, a must-read book published by Columbia University Press in 2021.
Putting aside Luciuk’s joking about being thankful that Putin’s “special military operation” has boosted his book sales, he sounded genuinely thankful that Russia has provided the Banderites an opportunity to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in the memory war. But like the actual war in Ukraine, it is hard to imagine that “victory” is attainable for them. After the “First Word on the Matter,” the Q&A session confirmed that there is no viable strategy to “get rid” of so-called “Chicken Kiev thinking in the global and specifically in Western academia and media.”
In conclusion, Zaryckyj even congratulated his thin-skinned audience’s “sort of fortitude to be able to get through all of this,” by which he meant the CUSUR conference, with “Moss Robeson standing outside.” Apparently I did not need an introduction for this crowd, which suggests their inability to claim ignorance of my message, that CUSUR is an OUN-B front group. Considering that I wasn’t really bothering anyone, and they still couldn’t ignore me, I can’t wait to see how the B’s react to next month’s event to expose “The Bandera Complex” in Berlin…! To hear it from Stefan Huth, the chief-editor of jungeWelt, “The agenda of our conference is: education against mass manipulation and historical lies!”
