The Adventures of Sirko
The Adventures of Sirko
And the Rise of Prince Nestor?
Note to subscribers: according to Substack, this is too long for some to read as emails, so I suggest you click through to banderalobby.substack.com, which I would recommend doing in general, because I usually make revisions after hitting send that are only updated on the website, and I imagine some of you aren’t seeing the photos embedded in your emails.
The weekend after Thanksgiving 2018, a small group of Ukrainian nationalists are said to have conducted weapons training on a huge property in upstate New York, including a trio associated with the Organization for the Defense of the Four Freedoms for Ukraine (ODFFU). Almost a year later, in September 2019, they were named in an anonymous complaint with “Underground Paramilitary Training Activities” in the title, submitted to the New York State Attorney General’s Charities Bureau, in which they were alleged to be “soldiers” for a “Fascist Terrorist organization” and in possession of “large-caliber weapons, many of them illegally acquired.”
The ODFFU, headquartered in “Little Ukraine,” Manhattan, was established a year after World War II ended by members of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera’s faction of the far-right Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B). During the war, the Banderites established a Ukrainian National Militia that provided much of the manpower for the Nazi pogroms that accompanied the arrival of German troops to western Ukraine in 1941. Later the OUN-B infiltrated the Ukrainian auxiliary policemen who did the Nazis’ bidding during the “Holocaust by Bullets.” After the German surrender at Stalingrad the Banderite policemen in western Ukraine defected en masse to form the backbone of the OUN-B’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which proceeded to hunt Jews hiding in the forests and wage a barbaric ethnic cleansing campaign against Poles. The ODFFU, dominated from the start by newly arrived Banderites from western Ukraine, presumably included some war criminals among its founding members.
One of the three alleged contemporary Banderite “soldiers,” Mykhailo Derekhovych, rumored to have been kicked out of the Ukrainian military, follows numerous Facebook pages associated with the extremist Right Sector movement and other far-right Ukrainian groups, as well as a private military security company in Kyiv boasting its own “Special Warfare Training Center.” Also on Facebook, Derekhovych (“Michael Melnyk”)1 has posted pictures of large guns in what appears to be his home.
At the very end of 2018, the trio is said to have tried involving a larger, unsuspecting group of Ukrainians in weapons training on the same large property in upstate New York, but they were rebuked. Someone allegedly left a grenade under somebody’s car tire as retribution for not cooperating.
The person who told this story declined to get more specific than “upstate New York,” I suspect because they didn’t want to admit that it happened at the Ukrainian American Youth Association “resort” in Ellenville, New York, and more specifically at the ideological winter camp it hosts on the last five or six days of each year. The affair largely consists of lectures by OUN-B members, many of them former officers of the Ukrainian Student Association of Mykola Michnovsky (TUSM), a defunct international organization led by the Banderites and named for the grandfather of Ukrainian ethnonationalism. The winter camp began as an annual TUSM “political workshop” in the 1970s.
Allegedly, the Banderite trio’s ringleader was an OUN-B recruiter (“Sirko”) named Andriy Shchegelskiy, the former president of ODFFU Branch 41 in Brooklyn. Apparently the stunt got Shchegelskiy expelled from the Brooklyn branch in January 2019, but not the OUN-B, members of which began to publicly feud with the Brooklyn Banderites later that year in a protracted battle for control of the ODFFU and its valuable headquarters building.
The origin of the ODFFU feud is still shrouded in mystery. According to the whistleblower complaint, Shchegelskiy partially “worked out the plan” (with Walter Zaryckyj — “Nestor”, Mykola Hryckowian — “Snih”, Christine Balko — “Lastivka” / “Popoluska”, Borys Potapenko — “Astronavt”, Pavlo Bandriwsky — “Stratehichnyj”, and Askold Lozynskyj — “Markian”) for the OUN-B to take back control of the ODFFU and the “Home of the Ukrainian Liberation Front” in Manhattan’s East Village neighborhood.
On the face of things, the OUN-B achieved a pyrrhic victory. The inner-circle Banderites exert control over the building, but many if not most ODFFU members and branches, such as Branch 41 in Brooklyn, recognize a rival board of directors as the legitimate leaders of their national organization (which owns the building).
Last summer, Shchegelskiy paid a visit to the OUN-B headquarters in Kyiv, and hung out with at least one member of its international leadership. In October, just after turning 32, he made his way from Bay Shore, Long Island to Manhattan for a meeting in the ODFFU building attended by Mykola Posivnych, another leading OUN-B member in Ukraine.
Posivnych is a historian of the Banderite “liberation movement” and the chairman in Lviv of the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists (KUN), a far-right political party founded by the OUN-B in 1993. In December 2018, the KUN chairman Stepan Bratsiun, who is apparently also an important OUN-B member, formed a tripartite “Leadership of Ukrainian Nationalists” with his counterparts in the OUN-M and Tryzub, the latter group being the main organizer of the extremist Right Sector movement in 2013.
After the meeting with Posivnych, Shchegelskiy announced his triumphant return to the Ukrainian American community, proclaiming himself more influential than ever. “I had a plan since January 26, 2019,” he said on Facebook, referring to the emergency meeting of ODFFU Branch 41 that resulted in his expulsion. “A three year plan. And I did a great job.” I assume the plan ends with OUN-B reinstating him as president of the Brooklyn branch this year, or more likely a rival, smaller Brooklyn branch.
A week after that fateful day in January 2019, Shchegelskiy observed the anniversary of becoming Facebook friends with the international OUN-B leader, Stefan Romaniw of Melbourne, Australia. “Blessed to have met you,” Shchegelskiy said. “Very few people make me wonder what my life would have been like without their influence in it...”
Rise of “Sirko”
Andriy Shchegelskiy was born in October 1989 in western Ukraine, just before the Berlin Wall came down. He grew up in 1990s Ukraine and moved to the United States with his family at the age of 12, arriving weeks after 9/11. A dozen years later, swept up in revolution and war from afar, it seems that Shchegelskiy was reborn as a Ukrainian Nationalist in his mid-twenties.
With his Ukrainian-born credentials, including a better grasp of the language than the second and third-generation OUN-B diaspora leaders, Shchegelskiy became a very active member of the Bandera cult in New York City. Allegedly he revived the OUN pseudonym of a belated relative who took the name of a famous 17th century Cossack leader, Ivan Sirko.
In March 2015, a year after Russia annexed Crimea, Andriy Parubiy, then the deputy chairman of the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian Parliament), stopped by the ODFFU building in Manhattan, when it still seemed to function smoothly as the US headquarters of OUN-B. Parubiy, many reading this already know, led the ‘Maidan Self-Defense Forces’ in 2013-14, and the paramilitary arm of the neo-Nazi ‘Social-National Party of Ukraine’ in the 1990s.
Parubiy visited the Saturday school run by the OUN-B affiliated Ukrainian American Youth Association (UAYA), and did an interview with Banderite media, including representatives of the Ukrainian American OUN-B newspaper National Tribune and ODFFU’s Radio Domivka. Shchegelskiy also sat in on the meeting, wearing a Banderite vyshyvanka (red on black base) and taking notes under a framed photo of OUN founder Yevhen Konovalets.
At some point in 2015, Andriy Shchegelskiy became the president of the 41st branch of ODFFU in Brooklyn, although he lives in Long Island, where the 42nd branch is located. Also that year, Shchegelskiy took a photo with Valeriy Chobotar, a leading member of Right Sector who had become the deputy commander of its paramilitary wing. Chobotar, like Right Sector’s founder Dmytro Yarosh, joined the far-right paramilitary organization Tryzub in the 1990s, when it still pledged loyalty to OUN-B. In 2016, Shchegelskiy won a free trip to Ukraine to participate in an annual war game organized by OUN-B’s far-right, militant Youth Nationalist Congress (MNK).
“Sirko” appeared on the MNK’s Facebook page a dozen times in 2016. In October, the rising Banderite leader in Brooklyn attended the MNK’s “Insurgent Fire.” The annual bonfire event is held in honor of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Sergey Repik, the camp commandant, became the new leader of MNK about a year ago. In the MNK’s Facebook post summing up “Insurgent Fire 2016,” which made note of Shchegelskiy’s presence, Repik can be seen in one of the attached photos wearing a SvaStone jacket.
According to Reporting Radicalism, a website run by the US-funded Freedom House in Ukraine, “The brand name SvaStone alludes to the swastika [‘svastyka’]. Its logo is a stylized swastika. The logo and name are exclusively used as a brand that targets far-right consumers.” In the picture, Repik is saying something into the ear of Dmitry Shved, the former head of the organization in Kyiv, and now a member of the MNK secretariat. Not visible in the photo, Shved has a neo-Nazi tattoo on his left elbow.
Andriy Shchegelskiy attended that year’s ideological winter camp in Ellenville, New York, dedicated to the memory of the Ukrainian-led, neo-fascist Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations. Decades ago, Zaryckyj and his generation of US-born future OUN-B leaders attended and even spoke at conferences organized by the American Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, headquartered in Manhattan’s “Home of the Ukrainian Liberation Front,” owned by the ODFFU.
Winter Camp 2016 in Ellenville featured at least two leaders of the ultranationalist MNK, including the co-author of an antisemitic Ukrainian Insurgent Army-themed Christmas play performed every year by the MNK in Ukraine. They were also there as representatives of “Free People,” another OUN-B front set up by the MNK that more or less coordinates the extremist-allied “Movement to Resist Capitulation” in Ukraine. A certificate for completing the ideological camp (see below) featured symbols of the OUN-B, ODFFU, UAYA, MNK, and Free People. A month later on Facebook, Shchegelskiy shared a photo of him holding up an OUN-B book on a snowy day in front of the UAYA’s Stepan Bandera bust in Ellenville.
In mid-February 2017, a Free People delegation visited New York and Washington. Shchegelskiy is missing from the photos shared by Free People of their visit to what I call the Bandera Building in Manhattan, but he’s mentioned in their Facebook post about it. In Washington, Shchegelskiy attended—and the MNK / Free People members participated in—a conference organized by Walter Zaryckyj (“Nestor”), the executive director of the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations and the US leader of OUN-B. The Free People delegation was led by Andriy Levus, an important OUN-B member who served as the deputy head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) in 2014, and is now the head of the Movement to Resist Capitulation, launched months after the election of Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019.
Soon after Free People visited New York, the Brooklyn branch of ODFFU held its annual meeting, where Andriy Shchegelskiy took a photo with one of its “legendary members,” a veteran of the Ukrainian division of the Nazi Waffen-SS. Also in 2017, Shchegelskiy took pictures with Ulana Suprun, the US-born acting Healthcare Minister of Ukraine (2016-19), Serhiy Kvit, the former Education Minister (2014-16), and Ostap Kryvdyk, an advisor to Andriy Parubiy (2014-19) who also visited the ODFFU building in 2015. Suprun and Kvit are OUN-B members, whereas Kryvdyk and Parubiy just work well with the Bandera Organization.
On January 1, 2017, what would have been Stepan Bandera’s 108th birthday, Shchegelskiy announced that he met another legend, Theodore Oleschuk of Passaic, New Jersey, a former leader of the ODFFU and OUN-B in the United States. Oleschuk, 94, passed away in November 2019, soon after the ODFFU feud spilled into the open. That was only a year after he and the last two ODFFU presidents were kicked off the board of the Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation (UAFF), a 100% OUN-B “facade structure.” (It published the National Tribune and co-owns the OUN-B headquarters building in Kyiv. The US branch of OUN-B refers to the UAFF as a “facade” in internal documents. From what I heard, every UAFF board member is in OUN-B.) Oleschuk’s ouster was in late September 2018, when Walter Zaryckyj became the UAFF president. According to the whistleblower,
Walter Zaryckyj was appointed as its president (even though he did not seek that position). This was done in order to make clear to the other UAFF, Inc. members that OUN (R) [also known as OUN-B] makes all the rules, as he said — “we run the show”. I told him that this will end badly for this foundation, but he replied that “…Nobody gives a shit. We can do anything we want.” I asked him why they were doing this, what was the purpose of all of this? His reply was — “Listen ■■■■■■■, this is nothing, we have a bigger fish to fry. We have to take over the assets of ODFFU, Inc., that is what we really want. Can you even imagine its market value at today’s prices? It’s going to be ours at any cost. We need and we will take over the ODFFU, Inc., whatever it takes.”
Earlier that summer, the Ukrainian state foreign language broadcaster’s English service UATV did a story about the ODFFU, starring Andriy Shchegelskiy. “Sirko” led the UATV reporter around the Ukrainian East Village neighborhood and the Bandera Building, telling her:
All this used to be Ukrainian back in the day. Just imagine. In the ‘50s, everyone spoke Ukrainian here… Prices have gone up a lot… This six story building that belongs to the [ODFFU] organization is now estimated at $30 million. Nevertheless, it is not for sale. The building is a home for Ukrainian American families and a place where a number of Ukrainian NGOs are located.
“We plan our strategies here,” Shchegelskiy told UATV. According to the whistleblower, Zaryckyj privately admitted that the OUN-B in fact planned for Banderite attorney Askold Lozynskyj (“Markian”) to buy the building from ODFFU, which under OUN-B control would invest the money in a foundation controlled by Pavlo Bandriwsky, the “Strategist” in Chicago. “Stratehichnyj” is probably the top US Banderite west of the Appalachians, at least since Bohdan Fedorak of Warren, Michigan died last year.
Only as of September 2018, a few months after speaking with UATV, did Andriy Shchegelskiy become a member of the ODFFU’s Facebook group. In the coming weeks, amidst the UAFF shakeup, Shchegelskiy was visiting Lviv. Among other things, he went to a Ukrainian Insurgent Army-themed tavern owned by the same people behind a notoriously antisemitic “Jewish-themed” restaurant neighboring the remains of Ukraine’s oldest synagogue.
The following month, back in New York, Shchegelskiy added a slew of OUN-B members to the ODFFU Facebook group: mostly people from Ukraine, like Mykola Posivnych and MNK leaders, but also Mykola Hryckowian from Pennsylvania — a year before the OUN-B installed him as ODFFU president. (According to the whistleblower, years ago Hryckowian “stole money from the donations received by the ODFFU 2nd Branch [in Manhattan]. The older ODFFU members decided to remove him and expel him from the ODFFU 2nd Branch.”) Meanwhile, the Brooklyn branch recognizes Theodore Oleschuk’s grandson as the ODFFU president. I don’t know for sure which faction of ODFFU has more people or branches on its side.
Within days of stacking the ODFFU Facebook group with OUN-B members, Shchegelskiy shared online a certificate he received on behalf of ODFFU Branch 41 from the paramilitary wing of Right Sector. About a week later — just before Shchegelskiy, “acting on the orders of Walter Zaryckyj,” according to a cagey source, supposedly led a small guns-toting event in upstate New York — a Brooklyn Banderite Facebook page shared a group picture of Branch 41 in a Thanksgiving post, including the alleged “soldiers” Shchegelskiy and Derekhovych.
Fall of “Sirko”
Just before noon on January 1, 2019, and allegedly in the aftermath of the grenade incident, Shchegelskiy wished his Facebook friends a Happy New Year, ostensibly from a country club in Sands Point, Long Island. The following afternoon, he changed his profile picture to one of him making a speech at the MNK war game in 2016.
According to Shchegelskiy, his “betrayal” at the January 26 meeting was the worst moment of his life, and also a set up by the same people he later accused of running a nefarious Bitcoin operation. A week after his expulsion from Branch 41, Shchegelskiy reminded his Facebook friends that he publicly said on UATV that the ODFFU building is not for sale.
In June, an international OUN-B meeting scheduled to take place in the Manhattan building was cancelled by ODFFU on short notice, and instead had to take place in the nearby headquarters of the Banderite-led Ukrainian Congress Committee of America. With the blessings of Stefan Romaniw in Australia, a year after purging the UAFF, the US leadership of OUN-B made its move on September 28, 2019 by holding an “extraordinary convention” in the name of ODFFU in Bloomingdale, Illinois.
The OUN-B members announced a new ODFFU board of directors chaired by Mykola Hryckowian, a.k.a. “Snih” (Snow). Early that morning, the whistleblower (“Wolodymyr”) sent his sensational complaint to the New York State Attorney General’s office, which the Banderites immediately got wind of. “Godspeed and hope all of us survive this insanity (or possible FSB op)!!” Zaryckyj said at the end of an email he sent to his comrades at noon.
On October 2, OUN-B members in the United States received a secret communication from the OUN-B “Provid” (Leadership), “Opinion on Recent Events in the American Terrain,” which began by reminding its readers that organizational discipline is at the core of the international Banderite system. The Provid strongly denounced “Wolodymyr,” speculating that he may work for the Russian news agency TASS, and justified the Bloomingdale conclave, concluding: “It had to be done.”
If he had not already done so, Shchegelskiy soon began to convince US Banderite leaders like Walter Zaryckyj that there is, or at least was, an ongoing Russian intelligence operation targeting the Ukrainian American community, which involved the mining of Bitcoin in the Bandera Building. For starters, he insisted that the electrical bill was too expensive.
To the alarm of many Ukrainian nationalists, comedian Volodymyr Zelensky and his Servant of the People party dominated the elections held in 2019. That August, Andriy Shchegelskiy asked his Facebook friends, “Where can I fill out the questionnaire to participate in the putsch [against Zelensky]?”
Earlier that summer, an Italian court sentenced Ukrainian soldier Vitalii Markiv to 24 years in prison for his alleged role in the death of an Italian photojournalist in eastern Ukraine. His lawyers declared their intent to appeal. Shchegelskiy published a short video on the immediate need to lobby Pope Francis to say something in support of Markiv.
Within 24 hours, Shchegelskiy posted a screed aimed at those who dismissed his efforts to influence the Pope. Among other things he took credit for the hashtag #FreeMarkiv. (The LinkedIn account of Shchegelskiy’s successor as ODFFU Branch 41 president includes among his accomplishments: “Coordinated #FreeMarkiv rally in support of falsely accused Ukrainian soldier, encompassing 10 countries worldwide.”)
The Milan Court of Appeals acquitted Markiv in November 2020. Earlier that year, the Pope spoke with President Zelensky, and reportedly “noted that he was dealing with the issue of the release of Ukrainian serviceman Vitalii Markiv.” Shchegelskiy triumphantly shared the news on Facebook, apparently taking credit for having influenced the Pope. He tagged 97 people, many if not most of them OUN-B members from around the world, and linked to his two posts about Markiv from 2019. Hryckowian, chairman of the OUN-B controlled ODFFU board of directors, commented, “All your work buddy. Not kidding.” Shchegelskiy responded, “thank you for admitting it sir, mostly people already forgot my contribution.”
“Sirko” then asked Sofiya Fedyna to publicly confirm his contribution behind the scenes. Fedyna is a member of Ukraine’s Parliament and former president Petro Poroshenko’s European Solidarity party. Fedyna granted Shchegelskiy’s wish in the Facebook comments. Three months earlier, a Ukrainian court released her on her own recognizance, after being charged in November 2019 with making death threats against President Zelensky. At the time, as an act of solidarity, Shchegelskiy shared a photo of them from 2015 that Fedyna published on Facebook, in which she’s wearing patches of the far-right UNA-UNSO organization and several Ukrainian volunteer battalions, including the Melnykite OUN Battalion and neo-Nazi Azov Regiment.
Incidentally a month after OUN-B’s “extraordinary [ODFFU] convention,” Fedyna and a “well-known military volunteer” Marusia Zviboriy vented in a livestream on Youtube and Facebook about President Zelensky’s “extreme disrespect for war veterans” while visiting the frontlines. Zviboriy addressed Zelensky: “You are doing such harm to this country that everybody wants you to be dead and is simply discussing whether it’s better to hang you, or to shoot you or whether a grenade will go off somewhere.” Fedyna added: “It seems ‘Comrade President’ thinks he is immortal. They [soldiers] are protecting Ukraine every day from the enemy you [Zelensky] are trying to bring back here with your presidency. A grenade may accidentally explode there…”
Shchegelskiy, having recently turned 30 years old, believed he had already begun to connect the dots regarding an FSB Bitcoin mining operation in the ODFFU building, or something along those lines. In early December, he thanked Andriy Parubiy’s assistant Ostap Kryvdyk for sharing an article by the US-funded Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL): “How Much Did Russian Spy Agencies Rely On Bitcoin? New Hints In Leaked Recordings.”
A few days later, the ODFFU Facebook page, run by OUN-B and Shchegelskiy in particular, called attention to an old post that had escaped the Banderites’ attention. A Russian American named Serge who made an appearance in support of Ukraine at the last ODFFU protest, held in December 2018 outside the Russian consulate in New York, noticed a man he suspected of being a Russian intelligence officer spying on the crowd. Serge began to take photos of the man, but he was spotted. Serge said he felt like he’d been thrown into a spy story as the man began to follow him and his wife until they lost him by ducking into a coffee shop.
The ODFFU Facebook page apologized for sharing a Russian language post, but felt it necessary to warn its followers to remain vigilant against potential Russian agents. (For over two years now, this has been the pinned post on the Banderite page.) Shchegelskiy then published one of his long rants on his personal account, and began to publicly speak of detecting Russian intelligence footprints in the form of Bitcoin. Under his post, in which he tagged OUN-B leader Stefan Romaniw and 97 other people, “Sirko” commented:
I should have been respected by russian intelligence. They miscalculated and paid dearly for It because I am that guy who would walk into a gun fight with a knife and come out on top. Just the wrong guy to fuck with. Period. Let it be clear as day… Let this hang here for a bit
(Shchegelskiy’s tough guy act, which has included publicly threatening ODFFU rivals, might have something to do with his allegedly having previously been a guest of the government for a few nights in Hempstead, Long Island.)
Some six months later, in mid-2020, Shchegelskiy predicted that Volodymyr Zelensky would be forced out of office by the end of October, starting his post “#Майдан-ІІІ,” or “Maidan 3,” calling for a new revolution. A year after Shchegelskiy’s “deadline” came and went, he claimed to have been preparing for a new “revolution” with some friends since February 28, 2019. In this post he tagged Stefan Romaniw, Mykola Hryckowian, Andriy Levus, Viktor Rog, and SBU general Victor Yahun. Zaryckyj’s Center for US-Ukrainian Relations held its tenth annual “US-Ukraine Security Dialogue” in Washington on the last day of February 2019. Zaryckyj, Hryckowian, Levus, and Shchegelskiy were there, but I am doubtful about Rog and Yahun. In any case I’m sure there was no discussion of a coup during the livestreamed event.
To recap, Romaniw is the international OUN-B leader, Hryckowian is the president of the ODFFU coup board, and Levus is the head of the Movement to Resist Capitulation. Viktor Rog is the editor of the OUN-B newspaper, and Victor Yahun, like Levus, is a former deputy head of the Ukrainian security service, who is also a member of the UAYA’s counterpart in Ukraine. “For those five (5) people that are tagged lol,” Shchegelskiy said, “I enjoy this cowboy shit way too much. God bless.” Then he dedicated a song to them called “I’m a Bad Man” from a compilation of “dark country music.”
On July 16, 2020, Shchegelskiy said that God gifted him with a certain analytical gift, and it’s “nice that this gift is listened to both in Kyiv and in Washington, and in Rome or even Moscow.” Shchegelskiy went on to say that he’d been slandered for the past year and a half, relating that to his exposure of a plot involving Bitcoins placed on the 3rd and 6th floors of the Bandera Building, as it were, by the same Branch 41 member who added Shchegelskiy to the ODFFU Facebook group.
Shchegelskiy then asked a series of almost QAnon-style “rhetorical questions,” the last of them being about a package he sent to Ukraine but wound up in Russia. “Of course we have already found all the answers to these questions,” Shchegelskiy said, crediting the US leader of OUN-B Walter Zaryckyj and Banderite SBU general Viktor Yahun for their help. Then “Sirko” claimed, not for the last time, to have been mentored by original members of OUN-B’s fearsome Security Service, explaining that he was putting to use the knowledge they passed onto him to get to the bottom of a “$30,000,000 scam” perpetrated by his ODFFU rivals.
“You can not fake this analytical gift, you just can’t. Absolutely blessed,” Shchegelskiy said in the comment section, followed by a praying-hands emoji. Of course, he’s so far been wrong about predicting a coup against Zelensky. In future posts about his Bitcoin conspiracy theory, Shchegelskiy again stressed that there are people who respect his analytical gift in Kyiv and Washington, and even suggested that because of him, it was decided to “clean house” in the ODFFU.
At the end of 2020, an as undergraduate student at Hofstra University, Shchegelskiy applied to its Frank G. Zarb School of Business. He was accepted, and began studying there last year. In August, a month before classes began, Shchegelskiy found out that last January, former ODFFU president Stepan Kaczurak had shared a Christmas photo from 2018 with Shchegelskiy in it. He declared his intention to crush Kaczurak like a cockroach. Three days later, Shchegelskiy posted an open letter to Kaczurak’s attorney:
Truth be told, I had to put him [Kaczurak] through social media in a strategic position, where he has no choice but to attack. No choice but to consult attorneys for possible lawsuits against me. That is my goal.
Check mate, a political check mate.
I’m being told he has lol good. Very good.
I apologize to the entire Ukrainian community, my High School friends and others who are reading this drama. But this is politics lol at its core. Brutal.
Especially Ukrainian politics lol
Plus this is something very personal.
My honor.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
- Andriy
Summer of Waz — the Return of Sirko?
I used to be under the impression that the US leadership of OUN-B quietly cut Shchegelskiy loose at some point, and that he’s been blowing smoke for some time now. Shchegelskiy repeatedly insisted the Bitcoin matter would come up in court, but to my knowledge it never did. However, this past summer, two weeks after his open letter to Kaczurak’s attorney, Shchegelskiy was hanging out with Viktor Rog practically next door to the OUN-B headquarters building in Kyiv. Rog is a member of the international OUN-B leadership and the editor of its newspaper, making him its most overt representative in Ukraine. In the coming months, Shchegelskiy announced that he’s back and bigger than ever.
In the meantime, perhaps as “Sirko” made his way to Kyiv, Walter Zaryckyj (“Nestor”), the US leader of OUN-B, finally discovered that I work nearby the ODFFU building. “How are you, Waz?” I asked Zaryckyj as I refilled his water and he ate a tuna salad sandwich — “Waz” being what his friends call him.
“Oh shit, you’re Moss Robeson! Oh shit, oh shit, this is Moss Robeson! This is the guy who’s written all the horrible things about me!” Zaryckyj exclaimed to the old high school friend buying his lunch. Not long after I got back to work, his server told me he wanted to speak with me, and that she thought she heard Zaryckyj accuse me of owning a building—of course, he did no such thing, but he is the rambling sort. “Dr. WAZ” warned me he had a witness if I poisoned his drink. Maybe I did dose him with a truth serum.
When I told Zaryckyj I heard he might be the next international OUN-B leader, he essentially confirmed he’s “in the running” (his words, not mine) by immediately declaring that I must have “bugged” the ODFFU building and listened to their meetings.
When I asked Zaryckyj about a photo of an April 2019 meeting of right-wing radicals in Ukraine that birthed the pro-Poroshenko “Protect Ukraine” campaign, which later re-launched as the anti-Zelensky Movement to Resist Capitulation, he confirmed it was him sitting next to Ukrainian nationalist leaders.
When I asked Zaryckyj about Shchegelskiy’s Bitcoin conspiracy theory, he confirmed that he shares his concerns. According to my notes, Zaryckyj said, “we believe they’re mining Bitcoin,” referring to his enemies in the ODFFU, whom he predicted are going to jail.
At some point, the spell wore off and Zaryckyj referred to the OUN-B as “this organization that you speak of,” refusing to acknowledge its continued existence. His friend wanted to take a picture of us, so Zaryckyj made a finger gun pointed at me while I put my hands in the air, as if to say “don’t shoot.” Only after his friend took the photo did the bad optics dawn on Zaryckyj, so he declared that it can never come into my possession. Making their way back to the Bandera Building, “Nestor” left his keys on the table, but I flagged him down. Zaryckyj said I didn’t need his keys, because I already “bugged” the building. He wasn’t joking…
According to a Ukrainian nationalist formerly involved with the OUN-B in England, by the 1990s, two ideological camps had emerged within the international Bandera Organization: one more moderate and evolutionary, and the other more extreme and revolutionary (including the London circle around the British OUN-B leader). This individual singled out Walter Zaryckyj as one of the ideologues of the extremist camp, as well as Borys Potapenko, another leading Ukrainian American OUN-B member today.
A month after our surprise encounter, Zaryckyj organized a conference dedicated to the 30th anniversary of Ukrainian independence at the Ukrainian Institute of America in uptown Manhattan, which closed that day for the private event. (72 hours later, President Zelensky gave a speech in the same venue. Zaryckyj sat in the back of the room.) I had the day off, so I hung around the Institute, thinking I might get the opportunity to talk to some of its influential guests about Zaryckyj’s Center for US-Ukrainian Relations being an OUN-B front.
The only speaker I managed to talk with was Eugene Fishel, who is the Foreign Policy and Western Republics Division Chief of the Office of Analysis for Russia and Eurasia in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research of the US State Department. I never confirmed if Victoria Nuland, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, #4 in the State Department, showed up for the speech that the agenda promised from her, but I saw Andriy Parubiy taking a smoke break during one of the panel discussions. I tried to ask him about Zaryckyj, but he insisted that he doesn’t know English, despite being the former chairman of Ukraine’s Parliament.
The following day, Walter Zaryckyj showed up to my job accompanied by the son of the “Strategist.” The same server from the other day told me, “the guy who said you own the building is back.” When I stepped outside to greet Zaryckyj, I called him by his pseudonym “Nestor,” but he pretended not to hear me. Instead, he instructed me to “stop the stalking.” I pointed out the irony of him showing up to the place I work at to tell me this.
I got off work minutes later, and saw Zaryckyj talking on the phone outside the ODFFU building. I approached him to say that he couldn’t fault me for looking for him the other day at his conference because two weeks prior he had shown up at my job when I wasn’t there, looking for me, making vague accusations about me working with “brownshirts.” (One of my co-workers thought he was high on speed.) An increasingly livid, babbling Zaryckyj started to threaten me, “If you don’t stop stalking, I just talked to somebody, man, who’ll help me fuckin’—” when I interrupted him to ask, “Is Shchegelskiy gonna break my knee caps?”
“No, it’s not gonna be Shchegelskiy,” possibly the next OUN-B Providnyk said, “it’ll be someone out in Washington who’s gonna blow you and [Max] Blumenthal and that whole fucking circle of dipshits working with the Russians.” (Lol.) Then he said “fuck you” repeatedly, jabbing at me from behind the glass door, as he entered the ODFFU building. About five to ten minutes later, I swung back by my job for a tea to go, and I thought I saw Zaryckyj escorting Parubiy inside the US Banderite HQ.
In late November 2021, when President Zelensky alleged that Russia was planning a coup against him on December 1, coinciding with a protest organized by the Movement to Resist Capitulation, Shchegelskiy reacted on Facebook, “Yooooo!!!!! I will fly to Ukraine in January to make sure it will be 100%.” The day after Christmas, apparently on his way to Ukraine, Shchegelskiy stopped in Rome and got coffee with Oles Horodetskyy, who I presume is the OUN-B leader in Italy. Shchegelskiy apparently did something to piss of Horodetskyy, which allegedly involved “Sirko” trying to lobby acquitted soldier Vitalii Markiv in Ukraine to make some kind of political statement. Two weeks later, Shchegelskiy seemed to claim that he met with Mykola Posivnych again — I heard as an appeal to play the peace-maker — and that Posivnych jokingly told him, “We will set up a monument to you. Right in the corner. You’ll be a hero.”
Days later, apparently with Walter Zaryckyj’s permission, Shchegelskiy publicly shared two slightly redacted screenshots of a long message that he sent to Zaryckyj (“Waz” in his phone) in June 2020, accompanied by a long Facebook message in which he tagged Stefan Romaniw and 83 other people. He claimed to have had a similar correspondence with Sofiya Fedyna and Oles Horodetskyy, but the Italian Banderite untagged himself from the post. “The context of the conversation,” according to Shchegelskiy, was that “Zaryckyj is sad that Trump is losing,” but the young fanatic (himself a Trump supporter until January 6, 2021) tried to reassure the US Banderite leader that with Biden in office, “the ‘lefties’ in Washington DC will support us and the upcoming Maidan-III.”
In what we can see of Shchegelskiy’s long message to “Waz,” it starts with his prediction that the Movement to Resist Capitulation will be the “core” of “new-Maidan” (a nationalist coup d’etat against Zelensky) when the timing is right.
On top of things, the new government has to be accepted by the world, and even according to you by November [2020] will be too late. Mainly because Trump would be out of power, thus again, [redacted…] October lol plus don’t be too sad about Biden being President sir. Key to successful Maidan, as bad as it sounds is Poroshenko being in jail for the time being. [Biden] and Mr. P. has a good relationship… Trust me on that.
On top of it, my plan is if S. Kruvonos becomes the head of the country afterwards the Third Revolution, this should be viewed positively by the west. Considering that a) Poroshenko is in jail, and he would be freeing him. b) Kruvonos was a candidate for Presidency and after he visited your conference in Washington lol on Feb 28, 2019 in March, 2019 he stepped down and supported publicly Poroshenko. This looks good in the eyes of western media. It’s as if a movie, the general came to rescue his former commander and chief. Trust me [winking emoji]
It seems far-fetched that the short presidential run in early 2019 by Serhiy Kryvonos, then the deputy commander of Ukraine’s special forces, ended because he attended Zaryckyj’s conference (on the day Shchegelskiy said he began to prepare for a new revolution in Ukraine), and much more likely that he made a deal with Poroshenko, who appointed him deputy secretary of the National Security and Defense Council in his final month as president. More serious than Shchegelskiy’s musings about his preferred coup leader is the observation that a successful coup d’etat would be more likely with Biden in office and Poroshenko in prison, not to mention his disclosure that Zaryckyj as a Trump supporter apparently felt time was running out for a coup in mid-2020.
I heard that Andriy Shchegelskiy at least used to be the Bandera Organization’s chief recruiter in the United States. He is apparently an OUN-B intelligence officer, or “rozvidnyk.” It’s even been rumored that Shchegelskiy replaced Hryckowian as the head of a department responsible for propaganda and disinformation, which might explain the Bitcoin narrative.
Whatever his exact role, Shchegelskiy has clearly been groomed by high-level OUN-B officers, presumably to carry the torch one day. It may be hard to imagine such a loose cannon being a successful future leader of the Bandera Organization, but then again, if a Zaryckyj can take the reins, why not a Shchegelskiy?
The diaspora Nationalists may imagine themselves to be the heirs to Stepan Bandera, but one day they will inevitably have to give up control of his Organization to their Ukrainian-born comrades. An ambitious hybrid Banderite like “Sirko” who grew up both in Ukraine and the US could presumably stand to benefit from the tension as a potential compromise candidate.
If nothing else, Shchegelskiy may prove to be the OUN-B’s last man standing in the United States. Much if not most of whatever promising young blood the Banderites had left in the US was spoiled in the ODFFU feud, such as the grandson of the “legendary” Theodore Oleschuk, who is the rightful ODFFU president according to some, and a decade ago tried to revive the Student Association of Mykola Mikhnovsky under OUN-B auspices. He turned his back on the Organization after it purged his grandfather, presumably among other things.
Serhii Kuzan, a former MNK leader who participated in Ellenville’s 2016 Winter Camp, parted ways with the OUN-B in early 2019, and has retained a relationship with the ODFFU faction opposing OUN-B. Before he walked away from the Bandera Organization, apparently because he opposed the plan for a new “Maidan” in Ukraine, Kuzan was rumored to be the heir apparent to the Australian OUN-B leader, Stefan Romaniw, or “Bereza” (Birch). So perhaps it’s true that Prince “Nestor” will ascend to the throne in the next year, and even that “Sirko” is destined for greatness within the Bandera Organization — but to be honest, I doubt it.
The account under the name Michael Melnyk is tagged in old Facebook posts by the ODFFU and Shchegelskiy as Mykhailo Derekhovych (“Михайло Дерехович”).
This report is mind-bogglingly REPLETE with a thousand-and-one names, terms, names of organizations, movements; it's bewildering to a reader (the vast majority of people on the planet) who don't know enough of the context. The reader comes away dazed and numb with a surfeit of Too Much Information. In addition, there are frequent adjectives like "extremist" or "fascist" etc that are not proven in the text, and seem leading the witness.