The Radicalization of 'Historical Truth'
Ukrainska Pravda, Banderite memory warriors, and the Azovization of Ukraine
Last week on my other Substack, I introduced the “elite” 13th Khartia brigade and 2nd Khartia corps from the National Guard of Ukraine (NGU), admired by the historian Timothy Snyder, neo-Nazi leader Andriy Biletsky, and NATO. Since then, the brigade has published a video with one of its members wearing a Black Sun patch, a notorious neo-Nazi symbol increasingly normalized in the Ukrainian military.
This post could be considered part 4 in a Bandera/Azov Lobby crossover series. It started with a couple articles about Oleksandr Alfyorov, Ukraine’s new “memory czar” from the Azov movement, which originated in the Azov unit of the National Guard (now the 12th Azov brigade and 1st Azov corps). The NGU Azovites had to let go of the Black Sun, one of their favorite symbols, to play along with western propaganda about their “depoliticization.”
Alfyorov used to head the “Khorunza service,” or “humanitarian training group,” of the Azov movement’s 3rd Assault Brigade, and now is the director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, “the central executive authority that formulates and implements state policy in this sphere.” Azovites from “the 3rd” still have Black Suns and other Nazi symbols in their units’ emblems. Inspired by the “Azov family,” the Khartia units also created a Khorunza service, or ideological training department, which uses the symbol of “Dontsov’s beast,” a hybrid lion-wolf-hedgehog imagined by the main ideologue of Ukrainian fascism in the 20th century.
The Khartia ideological unit is closely linked to the website “Historical Truth,” an offshoot of Ukraine’s top online news source, Ukrainska Pravda (UP), which is one of the major outlets that has warmed up to the Azovites. In 2023, George Soros’ Czech business partner Tomas Fiala sent ten million hryvnia (~$250,000) to the “politically correct” Azov Brigade. Fiala is the CEO of the investment firm that owns UP (“Ukrainian Truth”). In 2024, the overlords of this media outlet made donations to the NGU Azov unit and the 3rd Assault Brigade, two million hryvnia each.
Over a year ago, Alfyorov organized a conference, hosted by the 3rd Assault Brigade and its Khorunza service, on “real reforms of the humanitarian [ideological] sphere in the military,” including representatives of the Azov and Khartia brigades from the National Guard. Vakhtang Kipiani, the editor in chief of Istorychna Pravda, spoke at this event. Alfyorov and others from the ideological unit of the openly neo-Nazi 3rd Assault Brigade later met with the Parliamentary National Security and Defense Committee to discuss “humanitarian reforms” in the military. Joining them was Kipiani’s deputy editor, affiliated with an OUN-B front group.
‘My multicultural Ukraine’
Historical Truth broke a story in December 2022 that nobody else but the Bandera Lobby Blog cared to notice: “A citizen of Ukraine by birth was elected as the head of the OUN-B for the first time.” For any new readers, that’s the Banderite faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which still exists, and survived the Cold War in the Ukrainian diaspora. At the end of the month, Kipiani encouraged his social media followers to subscribe to the OUN-B newspaper, which is published in Kyiv but dates back to the 1950s in Munich. This famous journalist/historian said he was a longtime reader.
Although he was born in Georgia, and his mother hails from Novorossiysk (“New Russia”), Vakhtang Kipiani is a Ukrainian nationalist culture warrior. He is certainly a good friend of the Banderites, and he knows Alfyorov too. Earlier this year, Kipiani captioned an image of a “Judeo-Banderite” flag, probably being sold in Kyiv, “My multicultural Ukraine.” Around that time, a Polish presidential candidate accused Kipiani of making a death threat against him, by suggesting that the politician would meet the same fate as the Polish minister that the OUN assassinated in 1934.
Kipiani’s friendship with present-day OUN-B leaders, including their newspaper editor, dates back over 30 years ago to the “Revolution on Granite” in 1990, at the dawn of his career as a journalist. This student-led hunger strike led to the resignation of the head of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, although soon enough he became the 2nd prime minister of independent Ukraine. Participation in these events in the twilight of the Soviet Union, on the square in Kyiv that became the protest center of Ukraine in the 21st century, remains a claim to fame for OUN-B leaders Oleh Medunitsya and Viktor Roh.
In 2008, their friend Vakhtang Kipiani served as the editor-in-chief of “Great Ukrainians,” a TV show based on the 2002 BBC series “Great Britons,” that aired on a major channel in Ukraine. Both culminated in a vote on their country’s greatest historical figure. As part of this project, Kipiani made a 30 minute film that whitewashed OUN-B leader Stepan Bandera (1909-59), who ultimately placed in 3rd. Many were surprised and alarmed that a notorious fascist did so well. Kipiani, on the other hand, claimed that the vote was rigged to prevent the victory of arguably the most controversial and divisive person in Ukrainian history.
In 2010, the outgoing president Viktor Yushchenko decreed Stepan Bandera a “Hero of Ukraine,” and presented the award to his Canadian grandson, Stefko Bandera, another old friend of Kipiani, who appeared in his 2008 Bandera film. Meanwhile in Ivano-Frankivsk, western Ukraine, the regional head of a Banderite political party presented Kipiani with an award for his documentary and “unwavering patriotic position.” Seemingly years earlier, Stefko and Vakhtang took a picture together in front of the Bandera monument in Stryi, a small city in the Lviv region where Stepan’s father was born. Later in 2010, Kipiani founded Istorychna Pravda.
Apparently Historical Truth was more balanced in the early days, then again, Banderites and even Melnykites contributed articles from the start, for example OUN-M leader Bohdan Chervak. In 2012, Kipiani’s outlet published an essay by the historian John-Paul Himka on the role of the OUN-B in the massive pogrom that followed the Banderites’ declaration of pro-Nazi statehood in German-occupied Lviv, during the first days of Operation Barbarossa in 1941. This article enraged Ukrainian nationalists, and especially the Banderites, such as Volodymyr Viatrovych, the future memory czar (2014-19).
“Untruth in ‘Ukrainian Truth’,” opined Askold Lozynskyj, a New York/New Jersey-based attorney who earned a reputation as the OUN-B’s legal “hit man” in the U.S. before he led the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (1992-2000) and Ukrainian World Congress (1998-2008). He smeared Himka as “a paid propagandist” and “a migrant worker in the Jewish ‘Holocaust’ industry.” In early 2013, Historical Truth published an attempted take down of Himka’s essay by Serhiy Ryabchenko, another Banderite lawyer, who worked for the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory and the Secretariat of the Commissioner for the Protection of the State Language in the years to come.
Ironically, the “liberal nationalist” Banderite culture warriors, and Viatrovych in particular, opposed the optics of a torchlit march in Kyiv on January 1, 2014, a show of force from the far-right on the 105th anniversary of Stepan Bandera’s birth. On that day, Historical Truth published an article by Mykola Posivnych, an OUN-B affiliated historian from Lviv, on the topic of “Stepan Bandera in German prisons and concentration camps.”
This was, of course, in the middle of the “Euromaidan” protests that culminated in the so-called “Revolution of Dignity,” which was coined by a more radical OUN-B member, Yuriy Syrotiuk from the leadership of the far-right Svoboda party that planned the infamous march on New Year’s Day. Vakhtang Kipiani endorsed Viatrovych’s position: “Nazi aesthetics with marches and torches are alien to the Ukrainian liberation movement.” In 1984, the OUN-B held a torchlit march in Munich for the 25th anniversary of Bandera’s assassination. These days, Syrotiuk’s son has a vyshyvanka emblazoned with swastikas. Anyway, over a month before the Euromaidan first kicked off, Kipiani commented,
Oh, Volodymyr Viatrovych has already been criticized by Germanophiles, who enjoy wearing swastikas and drawing lightning bolts next to the word UPA [Ukrainian Insurgent Army]. Read the fascinating “discussion” on his page, which turns into a personal attack on the historian and his “liberalism,” mentioning the “CIA,” “Western foundations,” and “bourgeoisie.” The Bolsheviks’ rebranding has been successful, and now they call themselves something else;)
The Banderites’ rebranding has been successful, and since Ukrainian independence, they call themselves something else. They are still revolutionary nationalists in their minds, but most importantly, “state builders.” That is why the OUN-B’s Cold War era “Ukrainian Liberation Front” became the “Ukrainian State Front” in the 1990s, and now it’s the “World Council of Ukrainian Statehood Organizations,” an international coordinating body of OUN-B front groups. After 1991, the next goal was a strong Ukrainian nationalist state, with fantasies of Greater Ukraine rising from the ashes of a disintegrated Russian Federation.
Kipiani has recalled that in mid-December 2013, the early days of a pro-EU protest movement, “when there was an attempt to disperse the Maidan, I spoke with Volodymyr Viatrovych and told him, pointing to this building, that one day there would be a Museum of Freedom here.” He was referring to the October Palace in Kyiv. Viatrovych tried to make it happen for the Maidan Museum, as a “final victory of the idea of freedom over tyranny,” but clearly, he failed to achieve this.
Viatrovych’s greatest success was as the architect of Ukraine’s “decommunization,” and the simultaneous “Banderization” of state memory politics. “It’s great when people are in their place,” Kipiani said about Viatrovych and his Banderite colleagues put in charge of a resurrected Ukrainian Institute of National Memory in 2014. Five years later, there was speculation about Kipiani replacing Viatrovych in the wake of Zelensky’s rise to power. The political scientist Ivan Katchanovski warned that Kipiani would become “Viatrovych 2.0.” Meanwhile, Kipiani said that Viatrovych and his “small but highly motivated team has done a lot to form the state’s memory policy, open archives and overcome communism.”
Kipiani, unsurprisingly, got closer to the Banderites during Viatrovych’s time in power. From 2013-19, he hosted a TV program “Historical Truth with Vakhtang Kipiani” on ZIK, one of the “pro-Russian” channels that the Zelensky government banned in February 2021, shortly after Joe Biden took office. In 2014, Kipiani brought on his old friend Viktor Roh, the editor of the OUN-B newspaper, to talk about Zenovy Krasivsky, the OUN-B leader in Ukraine at the time of independence. He co-founded the far-right party “State Independence of Ukraine,” which restricted membership to ethnic Ukrainians.
In 2015, Kipiani visited Stefko Bandera in Canada, and began to spend time in the OUN-B archives in London. There he was assisted by Hennadiy Ivanuschenko, a Banderite memory warrior from Sumy, who was in the process of digitizing this collection in England. Back in 2010, Ivanuschenko joined Kipiani and Bandera for a photo, to celebrate the “Hero of Ukraine” award at the OUN-B headquarters in Kyiv. Collecting documents from Banderites in the Ukrainian diaspora became a long term project for Kipiani. In 2016, he praised the OUN-B archivist and interviewed him for Historical Truth. “Over the last year, I suppose he [Ivanuschenko] scanned more newspapers and magazines than our state libraries combined!”
Thanks to Mykola Posivnych, the Banderite “historian” from Lviv who wrote for Historical Truth, in 2017 Kipiani interviewed a 97 year old Omelian Koval, who led the OUN-B in Belgium for many years. Koval’s son Zenon allegedly filled his shoes, and represents the European Congress of Ukrainians on the executive committee of the Ukrainian World Congress. Hopefully we will return to the Belgian Banderites soon, something I’ve been meaning to write about.
By 2018, another Banderite archivist joined Historical Truth as deputy editor, and Vakhtang Kipiani appears to have become friends with Oleksandr Alfyorov, the press secretary for Andriy Biletsky, the “Fuhrer” of the Azov movement. In the next year, Zelensky came to power, promising to bring peace to Ukraine and negotiate with Russia, and Kipiani produced a book which energized the Banderites, who were determined to dissuade the new government from crossing any “red lines,” and if necessary to overthrow it, to prevent “capitulation.”
“The Case of Vasyl Stus” by Vakhtang Kipiani is a collection of documents from the Ukrainian KGB archives, which Banderites have overseen since 2014. Stus was a Ukrainian poet who died in a labor camp for Soviet dissidents, after spending 13 of his 47 years on earth incarcerated. Viktor Medvedchuk, an important pro-Russian politician in Ukraine before the Russian invasion, was Stus’ defense attorney who sold him up the river. Medvedchuk tried to block Kipiani’s book, published in the spring of 2019 after Zelensky’s landslide election victory. Of course, this just made the book famous and it flew off the shelves.
Putin’s friend scored a temporary victory later that year, shortly after the Banderites launched the “Capitulation Resistance Movement” (ROK, Rukh Oporu Kapitulyatsiyi), but Kipiani ultimately won in court. In the meantime, Kipiani signed statements from the ROK, which rallied behind him while it threatened Zelensky with a bloodier Maidan revolution. Alfyorov even spoke at a small ROK rally to support Kipiani, honor Stus, and denounce Medvedchuk, not long after the leader of the Azov movement boasted that they provided half of the manpower for the “anti-capitulation” protests.
‘With a golden lion on his sleeve’
It was in 2019 that I realized the OUN-B still exists, after discovering I lived nearby the oldest Stepan Bandera memorial in the world and the main Banderite summer camp in the United States. Volodymyr Birchak, a deputy editor of Istorychna Pravda from western Ukraine, was the guest speaker at the camp’s annual summertime “Heroes’ Holiday,” organized by a coalition of OUN-B front groups known as the “Ukrainian Liberation Front” in the Cold War.
Birchak was also the director of academic programs at the Center for Research of the Liberation Movement (TsDVR, Tsentr Doslidzhenʹ Volʹovoho Rukhu), an important OUN-B front group in Lviv. Previously, he served as the deputy director of the historical archives of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU, Sluzhba bezpeky Ukrainy), the Ukrainian successor of the KGB.
Readers may recall that Banderite “historians” (I prefer to call them memory warriors) associated with the TsDVR took over the SBU archives and the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory under Zelensky’s predecessor, Petro Poroshenko (2014-19). It appears that Alfyorov started to warm up to these Banderites by 2019, when he first submitted his candidacy to take over the Institute. That year, for instance, he interviewed Birchak on his radio show.
Earlier in 2019, the former SBU archivist addressed an open letter to Ukraine-based reporter Christopher Miller, now the Financial Times’ chief correspondent in Kyiv, then writing for Radio Svoboda, the Ukrainian branch of the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Birchak objected to an article that Miller wrote about a controversial “Banderite” flashmob: “Ukrainian Police Declare Admiration For Nazi Collaborators To Make A Point.”
The Banderite “historian” from Ternopil regurgitated the typical backwards narrative about anti-Nazi freedom fighters who saved Jews. Birchak insisted that “cooperation between the OUN and the Nazis ended in the first weeks after the German invasion of the USSR,” ignoring the Banderites’ infiltration of auxiliary police units, among other things. He also sidesteps the issue of anti-Jewish violence, instead claiming that Jews occupied “relatively high positions” in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or 1940s paramilitary wing of OUN-B, which massacred Jews and cooperated with the Germans in the final months of the war.
The website of the Banderite archive in London republished this article “for Christopher Miller.” Weeks later in Manhattan, Birchak spoke at a historical conference held by the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations. This is a significant OUN-B front group, established by yet another Banderite “facade structure” with ties to the same address in London, where one can find a private Stepan Bandera museum. The event in New York introduced him to Lubomyr Hajda, then senior advisor to the director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.
Then at the Banderite summer camp in Ellenville, New York, Birchak met Bohdan Kachor, a 95 year old member of the OUN-B, who used to be an important Banderite in the United States and Argentina. Birchak presented the old man, who died in 2021, with an award dedicated to the 90th anniversary of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists from the Ivano-Frankivsk Regional Council chaired by Oleksandr Sych, the chief ideologist of the Svoboda party, also a prominent OUN-B member.
Just over a year earlier, Birchak visited a Ukrainian Waffen-SS veteran in the hospital for his 90th birthday. This was Orest Vaskul, the same Waffen-SS veteran that led the OUN-B in Ukraine from 1995 until 2010, and received a state funeral in 2021, which Oleksandr Alfyorov attended.
Some Banderites, unlike Volodymyr Birchak, do not bother to glorify the Ukrainian Waffen-SS division, because the OUN-B did not support its creation. A great-uncle on his mother’s side fought in this “Galicia” division. In 2013, Birchak worked for a museum in Ternopil that showcased an exhibition on the Ukrainian Nazi military unit, which he might have helped to organize.
Ten years later, after a veteran of the Waffen-SS Galicia Division from Ternopil received a standing ovation in Canadian parliament, Birchak wrote a Facebook post on the “artificially, I repeat artificially!!! inflated scandal about Yaroslav Hunka.” He was equally alarmed by the decision of a Ukrainian church in Pennsylvania to cover up a memorial dedicated to the same unit. “I won’t write everything here,” Birchak said, “because I’m typing on my phone in the dugout, so there’s really no time or opportunity.” He signed off, “from the trenches of the Sumy region, with a golden lion [the symbol of the Galicia Division] on his sleeve.”
Elite culture warriors
Just over a month after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Historical Truth published “Independent Ukraine,” a nationalist pamphlet that Mykola Mikhnovsky wrote in 1900. On its author’s 149th birthday, the outlet renewed his call to fight for Greater Ukraine. “The war will be waged by all means, and a cultural struggle is considered as appropriate as a struggle by physical force,” Mikhnovsky wrote, and “now the entire flower of the nation in all parts of Ukraine lives with one thought, one dream, one nation: ‘One, united, indivisible, free, independent Ukraine from the Carpathians to the Caucasus.’” At the same time, “Everyone in the whole of Ukraine who is not for us is against us. Ukraine is for Ukrainians, and as long as even one foreign enemy remains on our territory, we have no right to lay down our arms.”
For the one year anniversary of the invasion, Istorychna Pravda welcomed a piece from Oleg Odnorozhenko, a former ideologist of the Azov movement in its early (more openly neo-Nazi) days. “Do you feel the significance of the current historical moment? All its grandeur and tragic inevitability?” his article began. It concluded, “We must not simply win. Our victory must be pure and flawless. Our every action, every step on the path to the goal must bear the imprint of nobility and greatness.” Perhaps somebody forgot to get this memo to the Office of the President.
After the Hunka scandal erupted in Canada, several columnists from Historical Truth weighed in. Ustyna Stefanchuk, a Ukrainian blogger now living in Canada, went first: “How dare Ukrainians defend themselves?!” The incident only “showed once again not only how many Ukrainophobes there are in the world and how strong their lobby is, but also how many Ukrainians are unaware of their history and are ready to follow any agenda, anyone’s interests, except their own national ones.”
Therefore, before scapegoating ourselves, stoning our own freedom fighters - today and from the past - we need to think about whether we really know the history in question, do we have enough information, facts, and understanding of the context to do so? Are we not echoing someone else’s, often hostile, narratives?
As an illustration, here is one of the most famous photographs of the farewell to the Kolomyia volunteers who volunteered for the Division to fight for Ukraine’s independence. It is interesting that those smiling young people, like the elderly veteran Yaroslav Gunka, fought against the same enemy as our defenders today — the Russian occupiers. Perhaps this fact alone will make us think twice before blindly repeating nonsense?
In the coming days, Istorychna Pravda published commentary on the Hunka scandal from Volodymyr Birchak (his Facebook post), Olesya Isayuk from the TsDVR, and OUN-M leader Bohdan Chervak. Meanwhile, the Kyiv History Museum displayed a photo exhibit from the Khorunza service of the 3rd Assault Brigade, which recreated pictures of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and Waffen-SS Galicia Division.
For Marta Havryshko, a historian from Lviv who formerly worked for the TsDVR as a librarian, the twin scandals provided a rude awakening about the Nazification of memory politics and the military in Ukraine. Her colleagues’ silence further motivated Havryshko to shine a light on these issues, which led to death threats from neo-Nazis, and her appearance on a notorious “hit list” website. This past summer, Kipiani was disgusted that numerous western scholars signed an “Open Letter in Defense of Academic Freedom and the Ukrainian Historian Marta Havryshko,” which he called “an anti-Ukrainian manifesto.” He mocked “the mythical ‘global right-wing network’ that the researcher is so eagerly searching for.”
At some point last year, Vakhtang Kipiani and Volodymyr Birchak joined the Khartia brigade, and they appear to have co-founded its ideological unit with the famous poet Serhiy Zhadan, who is bravely holding down the fort at “Radio Khartia.” Zhadan and Kipiani might be the reason that historian Timothy Snyder supports Khartia. Snyder, a contributor to Historical Truth, apparently referred to “The Case of Vasyl Stus” in his viral 2022 lectures at Yale University on “The Making of Modern Ukraine.”
As for Zhadan, several years ago he starred in a show in New York City that was at least partially based on Snyder’s bestselling book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. It just so happens that the theater was located a few blocks away from the U.S. headquarters of OUN-B, and the director grew up in Manhattan’s nationalist “Little Ukraine.”
Since last year, the Khartia Khorunza service has hosted public events with Banderite memory warriors in Kharkiv. In October 2024, Viatrovych and Kipiani discussed “The Past in the Information War Against Ukraine.” Viatrovych returned in June 2025, along with Ruslan Zabily from the TsDVR. Sviatoslav Lypovetsky and Lesya Bondaruk are other Banderites that Kipiani has brought to Kharkiv for public lectures.
Sviatoslav Lypovetsky is the deputy chairman of the World Executive of the Ukrainian Youth Association, an OUN-B front group. (The U.S. branch owns the camp in Ellenville, New York.) He wrote a book about the Banderites that acknowledges their use of “facade structures,” and describes the OUN-B as “the most legendary of Ukrainian institutions, which for over 80 years has led an effective and sacrificial battle to achieve and consolidate Ukrainian Statehood. The OUN’s activities are widespread in many different countries…”
Lesya Bondaruk is one of the Banderites that remains embedded in the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory. In the 1990s, she was a member of the far-right “Tryzub,” which got started as an OUN-B paramilitary youth group, but it parted ways with the Organization by the turn of the 21st century. In any case, she knew Tryzub commander Dmytro Yarosh, the first leader of Right Sector (2013-15). She did a book talk with Kipiani in Kharkiv earlier this week.
This year, Vakhtang Kipiani praised the appointment of Oleskandr Alfyorov to head the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory as a “positive development.”
There is a need to continue shaping a policy of remembrance that will, on the one hand, unite the nation and generate meaning, and on the other, make our Russian enemies and Polish partners understand that they must accept that we will not betray our heroes. A year ago, when my brothers and I began to form the Khorunza service of the 13th Brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine “Khartia”, we talked with Sasha [Alfyorov] many times, exchanged experiences, and shared plans. I hope that now the voice of the army will be stronger in matters of historical policy and will influence state decisions.
As for top OUN-B memory warrior Volodymyr Viatrovych, he also welcomed the news. “Finally, the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance will have a leader, Oleksandr Alfyorov, with the strength and inspiration to lead this structure, which is so important for our victory.” It remains to be seen if the Banderites and their fellow travelers won’t eventually change their minds about a friend of Russian neo-Nazis taking the reins of the memory war apparatus in Ukraine. (To be continued…)
