The OUN-B, or “Banderite” faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which never ceased to exist since the 1940s, recently denounced Volodymyr Zelensky’s controversial law that would have more or less put Ukraine’s top anti-corruption agencies under his control. With the so-called “Sorosites” (a pejorative term for Ukrainian “anti-corruption activists” and journalists beholden to grants from NATO governments and western-funded NGOs) supporting the first major protests against Zelenky’s wartime government, I thought I should finally write something about the Banderites’ relationship with Ukraine’s influential “anticorruption community.”
Take for example Vitaly Shabunin, “Ukraine’s most prominent anti-corruption activist.” He co-founded the “Anti-Corruption Action Center” (AntAC), largely financed by the US and EU governments, as well as George Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation. It just so happens that this famous “Sorosite” was an early member of the OUN-B’s far-right Youth Nationalist Congress (est. 2001), according to his friend Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, a Banderite politician and former “anti-corruption activist” who led Transparency International Ukraine before joining parliament in 2019. Earlier this month, police raided Shabunin’s home, and mobilized him, outraging “civil society” and “friends of Ukraine” around the world.
My favorite newsletter, “Events in Ukraine” by Peter Korotaev, recently summarized the Shabunin saga in this way: “The liberals have chosen him as their leader in the struggle against Zelensky, who they are now attacking as a miniature Putin because of his ruthless (in fact, rather lackluster) efforts to subject some of them to the same standards as the rest of the population.” As he explains, the so-called Sorosites are supposed to “function as the local colonial administration of the US,” and their beloved anticorruption organs are actually “instruments of colonial control set up by Washington.”
Peter has been covering “Shabunin-gate” for over a year, such as last summer: “According to strana, Zelensky and his entourage are displeased with attempts by US ambassador Bridget Brinks to protect figures like Shabunin.” Meanwhile, “The head of the Anti-Corruption Centre (AntAC) is accused of driving around Kiev on a Nissan Pathfinder which was purchased on the basis of donations for the AFU [Armed Forces of Ukraine]. The car was meant to be used in the Donbass.”
“What if the Sorosites are right to fear the Georgian scenario?” asked a post from Events in Ukraine about the liberal protests against bill no. 12414. “What if Zelensky is purging them in preparation for some kind of agreement with Russia?” This is a tantalizing idea, considering that Sorosites and Banderites seem to be united in their conviction that Ukraine and Russia should fight to the death, but Zelensky has already backed down.
As the situation gets worse for Ukraine, militant culture warriors are still planning the “decolonization” of Russia while avoiding the frontlines. Look no further than Yurchyshyn’s parliamentary commission to “Make Russia Small Again,” and the “International Center for Ukrainian Victory” that a friend of the “Bandera Lobby” co-founded with AntAC leaders.
“President Discussed the Victory Plan with Representatives of Ukraine’s Civil Society,” Zelensky’s office reported last October. Co-founders of the International Center for Ukrainian Victory (ICUV) attended the meeting, including Hanna Hopko, a former member of parliament (2014-19). That evening, Zelensky caused a stir by wearing one of the shirts he received from ICUV leaders that said “Make Russia Small Again.” Perhaps for him it was a joke, but for others, like Hopko and the Banderites, it is a serious cause.
It’s necessary to return to the topic of the Reanimation Package of Reforms (RPR) Coalition established in 2014 after the “Maidan” revolution, which I’ve written about several times on this blog and Defending History since 2020. ICUV co-founder Olena Halushka, for example, the head of international relations for AntAC, had the same job in the RPR Coalition.
With funding from USAID, Global Affairs Canada, the EU Delegation to Ukraine, the United Nations Development Program, and others, the RPR Coalition at least used to be the “largest and most visible reform network” in Ukraine. According to its website, “With the RPR’s advocacy support, revolutionary laws were adopted concerning anti-corruption, public broadcasting, restoring trust in the judicial system, higher education, and others. [Original emphasis]” The “other” areas included “national memory policy,” which the RPR delegated to its Banderite “experts” from the Lviv-based “Center for Research of the Liberation Movement,” an OUN-B front group.
(Meanwhile, as told by Wikipedia, the US and EU-funded AntAC “assisted Ukraine’s newly elected parliament in developing quality anti-corruption legislation, including laws establishing the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, National Agency on Corruption Prevention, the High Anti Corruption Court open property registers, and electronic register of asset declarations of public officials.”)
Hanna Hopko, the founding RPR coordinator, joined parliament in 2014, quickly becoming the chair of its foreign affairs committee and a hardline pro-western politician. That year, Foreign Policy magazine named Hopko in its annual list of “100 Leading Global Thinkers,” she completed a “Leadership Seminar” at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and the US-funded National Democratic Institute (NDI) recognized her with its annual “Democracy Award.” Hopko gave Vice President Joe Biden a tour of Kyiv in June, and Biden introduced her at the NDI’s Democracy Award Dinner in December: “she’s not only smart, she’s tough, she knows … Ukraine has been a kleptocracy.” Soon she joined the steering board of the World Economic Forum’s “New Economic Vision for Ukraine.”
Hanna Hopko allied with the Banderites before the 2019 elections that saw the rise of Volodymyr Zelensky and his “Servant of the People” party. That year she started to speak at conferences in Washington organized by an OUN-B front group, the “Center for US-Ukrainian Relations” (CUSUR), which is supposedly committed to “combating corruption” in Ukraine. Hopko’s friend from Australia, OUN-B leader Stefan Romaniw, who got to know to her as a vice president of the Ukrainian World Congress, introduced Hopko at the June 2019 CUSUR event as someone who “just about lives here now in America.” Last year Hopko mourned Romaniw as “an example of infinite, sacrificial and active love for Ukraine.”
Less than three weeks before the new president’s party dominated the 2019 parliamentary elections in Ukraine, flushing out Hopko and many other nationalists, “the representatives of Ukrainian civil society” from the RPR Coalition drafted their “Toronto Principles” for the “Ukraine Reform Conference” that the Canadian government hosted in early July. (Some priorities: “Improve the effectiveness of anticorruption infrastructure,” “Develop and protect civil society,” “Realize cultural and national memory.”) One of the highlights of the conference was a conversation between Hanna Hopko and the Canadian foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland. Whereas Freeland has struggled to navigate the memory war, in 2018, Hopko co-sponsored an RPR-drafted bill with OUN-B leader Oleh Medunitsya that rehabilitated veterans of the OUN and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
By 2020, Hopko supported the Banderite-led “Capitulation Resistance Movement” (2019-22) and more menacing protests spearheaded by the Azov movement. As the far-right increasingly threatened Zelensky with regime change, Hopko described his first year in power as the “year of [pro-Russian] revanche.” In the final days of 2019, she denounced a prisoner swap between Russia and Ukraine as “revanche, betrayal and capitulation packaged as a move to save human lives.” Meanwhile, AntAC, Transparency International Ukraine, and allied NGOs warned, “Ukraine risks making its justice system a hostage of the demands of the aggressor state.”
Hopko’s star rose further among the “friends of Ukraine” as the new head of “ANTS,” a “National Interest Advocacy Network” easily confused with AntAC. It was in 2021 that Hopko, ANTS and AntAC first organized a USAID and EU-funded “Zero Corruption” conference in Kyiv, including speeches from USAID administrator Samantha Power, some zealously “pro-Ukraine” members of Congress, and Volodymyr Zelensky himself. The 2022 conference featured more officials from Kyiv, Washington, and European capitals.
Soon after the Russian invasion, Hanna Hopko co-founded the International Center for Ukrainian Victory with her friends from AntAC, Daria Kaleniuk (the executive director) and Olena Halushka (head of international relations). Hopko and Kaleniuk became loud proponents for a no-fly zone in Ukraine, to be enforced by NATO. Opinion polls indicated that a large majority of people in the US supported this idea, apparently not understanding the implications. Even politicians like Marco Rubio recognized that it would mean “starting World War III.”
In 2022, AntAC received a “Democracy Award” from one of its sponsors, the US-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which noted that AntAC is a “NED grantee” that “organized protests and advocacy actions in cities including Paris, Berlin, Brussels, and Washington, DC.” The “Center for Civil Liberties” in Ukraine, another recipient of the 2022 NED Democracy Award, funded by the US, EU and Soros, even won the Nobel Peace Prize that year, despite endorsing NATO military intervention in Ukraine.
AntAC and ICUV co-founder Daria Kaleniuk famously “berated” the British leader Boris Johnson during a visit to Poland, about a week after the invasion. “We are asking for the no-fly zone, we are seeing response that it will trigger World War III, but what is the alternative, Mr. Prime Minister? … You’re coming to Poland, you’re not coming to Kyiv, Prime Minister, you are not coming to Lviv, because you are afraid! Because NATO is not willing to defend [Ukraine], because NATO is afraid of World War III, but it is already starting!”
Johnson admitted that “there is not enough that we can do … to help in the way that you want, and I’ve got to be honest about that, and when you talk about the no-fly zone, as I said to Volodymyr Zelensky, I think a couple times, unfortunately the implication of that is that the UK would be engaged in shooting down Russian planes, it would be engaged in direct combat with Russia.”
In the coming days, Kaleniuk and Hopko met with Tony Blinken, the US Secretary of State—not for the first or the last time. Later that year, Kaleniuk testified to Congress’ Helsinki Commission that “Ukraine’s successful story in fighting corruption is the ultimate threat to Vladimir Putin and his kleptocratic regime,” and Hopko helped to explain why “Decolonizing Russia” is a “Moral and Strategic Imperative.”
In April 2022, Hanna Hopko said “NATO should use its air defence systems to start protecting the sky over Ukraine,” and “NATO troops do not even need to set their foot in Ukraine.” Shortly after visiting NATO headquarters last October, and days before meeting Zelensky to hear about his “Victory Plan,” Hopko declared that actually, “NATO countries should send troops to Ukraine faster and lift restrictions on deep strikes [inside Russia] finally.”
In 2023, Hopko explained, the choice is NATO membership for Ukraine, or World War III. Furthermore, “Ukrainian Victory means a defeat of [the] axis of evil, not just russian [sic].” In 2024, she attended the inauguration of Taiwan’s new president, and citing the Banderites’ favorite Washington think tank “expert” on Russian collapse, Hopko updated her social media followers, “There are several possible scenarios for NATO’s direct involvement in Ukraine and urgent preparations for action need to be made now, says Janusz Bugajski.” Last December, this prominent anticorruption activist proposed another solution: a pair of Trump Towers in a liberated Crimea, and one in Georgia, to “stabilize the region and dilute russian influence.”
It’s no coincidence that the anticorruption warriors are some of the greatest champions of a devastating proxy war in Ukraine. The eternal fight against corruption and the internal war against the “pro-Russian fifth column” is one and the same, at least for some Ukrainian nationalists and western officials.
For Zelensky, the return of Biden must have portended “tough love” from the “friends of Ukraine” in Washington, and their best friends in Ukraine’s “anticorruption community.” As Biden’s former advisor Michael Carpenter predicted in 2017, if his boss won the presidency in 2020, he would be “openly pushing Ukraine’s political leaders to do more in combatting corruption.” In 2020, Carpenter told Politico, “We can give Ukraine all the Javelin missiles we want, but if Russia has political influence in that country through various corrupt relationships, then [they] are walking in through the back door while we’ve got our eyes glued to the front door.”
According to Carpenter, “We have to promote Ukraine sovereignty in a holistic way, which means both military support and security assistance, but also helping Ukraine beat back this growing, by the way, Russian covert influence within its politics.” After Biden returned to the White House, Zelensky’s National Security and Defense Council sanctioned several “pro-Russian” TV stations, apparently triggering the build up of Russian troops that preceded the 2022 invasion.
As the far-right Capitulation Resistance Movement got started in 2019, Carpenter described the peace process embraced by Zelensky as “the primary threat to Ukraine internally right now.” Speaking to the Banderite CUSUR, he suggested that the US should support separatist movements in Russia. With nationalists agitating for regime change in 2020, Carpenter made a speech in Kyiv, declaring that “we are at a crucial crossroads,” and Ukraine is “ground zero” for an epic “clash” between “liberal democracy” and “authoritarian oligarchy.” Under President Biden, this former managing director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement served as Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and then Senior Director for Europe at the US National Security Council. As of 2025, he still says that Ukraine will recover all of its territory, it just might take several decades to accomplish.
There’s more to say about the “Sorosites” and Banderites — to be continued? For more on the “Sorosites” and Azovites, check out Events in Ukraine. As for the Banderites and Azovites, stay tuned for more coming soon on this Substack and my Azov Lobby Blog… Anyway, thanks for reading. If you want to support my work, you can “buy me a coffee” or pledge to become a paid subscriber.
Shabunin, that mole on his lip, is that a listening device planted there by Canada's spy agency? 😉
HRM's witch in waiting, Christina Alexandra Freeland, has gone to ground. I bet she's been busy checking her overseas numbered accounts.
Kaleniuk and Hopko will get the NATO War On Russia that they so crave.