Which Way Ukrainian Hooligan?
Nazis at a Crossroads: 'Nation Europa' or European Union
Note to subscribers: Substack says this post, from my other blog, is “too long for email.” This version has a “Bandera Lobby” coda. This is my last article of the year, but stay tuned for the 2024 “Bandera Lobby Review,” coming soon. And then it might be time to wind down this Bandera Lobby Blog, which is turning 5 years old. But the show must go on. Fortunately, you can subscribe to the Bandera Lobby Show on Youtube (new episodes are on the way).
This past summer’s “Nation Europa” conference in the heart of western Ukraine tried to obscure the role of the country’s most powerful neo-Nazi movement (more or less from eastern Ukraine) in launching a new European fascist network. Azov wasn’t invited, they said. This blog’s report on that meeting was largely based on the findings of “Dreznica Goat,” a fellow researcher of the far-right in Ukraine, who called it from the beginning: Azovites didn’t need to invite themselves to their own event.
Earlier in 2024, Azov’s openly neo-Nazi brigade in the Ground Forces of Ukraine announced that a handful of its fighters were launching a summer tour of Europe. Apparently they were expecting to be treated like rock stars. This unit, the 3rd Assault Brigade, is not to be confused with Azov’s other (more famous) brigade in the National Guard, which has made an effort to refine its image for Western liberals.
Much of the tour was cancelled, a month before the “Nation Europa” event, and not long after yours truly revealed that a decorated 3rd Assault fighter visited Auschwitz to mock the Holocaust. He went there wearing a shirt from the Russian-Ukrainian neo-Nazi band “M8L8TH” with a quote attributed to Hitler on the back. Thanks to Dreznica Goat, readers of this blog already learned that the bass guitar player in M8L8TH is a medic in the 3rd Assault Brigade who represented the Nation Europa network at a roundtable of neo-Nazis on Ukraine’s Independence Day.
My article about the conference failed to identify several of the participants, most importantly Andriy Malkov, an organizer of the event, who made multiple speeches and moderated the roundtable discussion. He also appears to have served in the 3rd Assault Brigade, which is commanded by Azov leader Andriy Biletsky.
Malkov was once part of the “Rodychi” (Relatives) gang of white supremacist football hooligans in Kyiv, from which an important clique in the Azov movement — and a rival splinter group — emerged. For more than half a decade, his old friend Serhii Filimonov has led the militant organization “Gonor” (Honor), which essentially “sold out” as the Nazi pagan stormtroopers of the Western-funded NGO complex in Ukraine. Apparently they are no longer friends. It’s easy to imagine that the future organizer of “Nation Europa” found himself at a crossroads.
A coalition of neo-Nazi hipster hooligans, radical NGO activists, far-right influencers and military fundraisers is apparently being groomed for the big stage by powerful interests, if only to ride the coattails of a potential successor to Volodymyr Zelensky.
Over ten years ago, Andriy Malkov commented on a picture of Serhii Filimonov, 19, wearing the same shirt from the “White Boys Club” that we’ve already seen on Malkov. The White Boys Club is an umbrella of hooligan firms that support FC Dynamo Kyiv and the Azov movement. In 2014, Filimonov joined the Azov Battalion with the call-sign “Son of Perun,” referring to the Slavic god of war that neo-Nazi pagans tend to worship. In a 2022 interview, Filimonov said, “those who are interested know that ‘Gonor’ are pagans. And many [far-right/neo-Nazi] symbols that can scare people are actually related to our religion.” In fact, “We look after the temple on Lysa Hora.”
Malkov and Filimonov fought in the Azov Battalion a decade ago, when it had a reputation for being an openly neo-Nazi unit. Subsequently, they joined the nascent Azov movement’s Civic Corps, a forerunner to its political party, the National Corps. “Son of Perun” led the Kyiv branch of both organizations. The journalist Oleksiy Kuzmenko tells us, “Filimonov’s old social media posts from his days in the Azov include a 2014 post seemingly honoring Adolf Hitler’s birthday with thematic songs and a commentary ‘I regret that you won’t rise up like Jesus, grandpa’, etc. Filimonov’s VK also links to ‘SoberNazi’ Twitter handle.”
After Dynamo Kyiv won the 2015 Ukrainian Cup final, fans swarmed the field and Malkov’s friend Rostislav Karpich ran onto the pitch with a swastika on his shirt. Malkov had the same one. Later that year, Rodychi hooligans from the Civic Corps — including Filimonov’s close friend Ihor Potashenkov, or “Malyar” (Painter) — viciously attacked black soccer fans at a European Champions League match in the Ukrainian capital.
Filimonov’s gang of Nazi hooligans went unpunished for these high-profile hate crimes, despite an international media spotlight and consequences for Dynamo Kyiv. Oleksiy Kuzmenko noted in 2018, Potashenkov was an “active participant of some of Ukraine’s iconic and more controversial moments during the [2013–14] Euromaidan demonstrations.” Kuzmenko reported that in 2016, this notoriously violent neo-Nazi with “clearly visible swastika tattoos” on his head nevertheless received “sophisticated training” from the European Security Academy based in Poland.
From 2015–18, Andriy Malkov appears to have grown as close as ever with Filimonov’s circle of Azov veterans, in particular Ihor Potashenkov and Nazarii Kravchenko, who was the deputy head of the National Corps. In 2018, the State Department’s annual report on human rights practices in Ukraine described the National Corps as a “nationalist hate group.” That year there was a series of neo-Nazi attacks on Romani people and settlements in Ukraine. Filimonov led a group of Azov militants that perpetrated at least one of these “pogroms.”
In the coming weeks, Kateryna Handziuk, an “anti-corruption activist” in Kherson, was attacked with sulfuric acid. Later that year, Handziuk died of complications from the severe injuries that she suffered, and Filimonov’s crew supported the protest campaign, “Who Killed Katya Handziuk?” This appears to have forged an alliance between the Rodychi hooligans and leaders of Ukrainian civil society™ which probably encouraged Filimonov to spearhead an Azov splinter group in 2019. As a project manager for the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union once said,
I had a very cautious optimism when some of the not-so-recent people from the National Corps moved away from Biletsky, created their own civilized NGO, and began to cooperate with healthy civil society forces. In fact, Nazarii Kravchenko, Serhii Filimonov, Igor Malyar [Potashenkov] and all of Gonor became the “security service” during peaceful actions, in which everyone participated: right-wing, left-wing, human rights defenders, veterans… And it was a process of unification that made me very happy.
Perhaps the “best man” in this marriage, Serhiy Sternenko is a nationalist influencer in Ukraine, and former leader of the extremist Right Sector in Odessa who rebranded as a radical anti-corruption activist. Under Sternenko’s local leadership, Right Sector helped to perpetrate the May 2014 massacre of anti-Maidan activists in Odessa. His friend Kateryna Handziuk was among those who praised the far-right “patriots” that instituted “Ukrainian order” in this Russian-speaking city of southern Ukraine (and poured gasoline on the fire in eastern Ukraine).
Serhii Filimonov’s dramatic falling out with Azov leader Andriy Biletsky was related to his budding alliance with Serhii Sternenko. Biletsky and other Azovites reportedly beat up Filimonov and his right-hand man Nazarii Kravchenko in 2020, and “demanded to know who ordered the media support for Sternenko.”
Two months before Handziuk was viciously attacked with acid outside her home in Kherson, another man assaulted Sternenko in Odessa and wound up dead. To hear it from Christopher Miller, now the Financial Times correspondent in Ukraine, “Sternenko chased the attacker down and sliced his gut open, spilling out his intestines. He posted a video of it and has boasted about chasing the guy down after he was attacked.”
Sternenko subsequently acquired hero status among Rodychi hooligans and radicalized NGO liberals. According to the sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Sternenko is an especially notorious case of a criminal who found a way to avoid punishment for many years via switching from far-right to a pro-Western liberal. I don’t understand why he should be allowed to do this. The civil society that applauded this is very sick.” Katherine Quinn-Judge, a former senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, explained in 2021, “A critical mass of young Ukrainian liberals consider Sternenko A-OK, because a) he’s anti-Russian, b) he’s said that beating up gays isn’t compulsory, c) he has opposed genuine corruption in Odesa, and d) he’s started wearing glasses and whatnot.”
The campaign to “Free Sternenko” gave these nationalist bedfellows another cause to rally around (typically with flares, supplied by the Nazi protest experts), which culminated in a riot outside of the presidential office building on his 26th birthday. In the meantime, Sternenko’s friends from the NGO complex grew closer to Gonor. A perfect example is Melanie Podolyak, the daughter of a former deputy minister of culture.
Sternenko and Podolyak were apparently both friends of Kateryna Handziuk, and by 2021 some people speculated that they were dating. From roughly 2016–19, Podolyak worked as a project manager for the Lviv Media Forum and later the Lviv Security Forum, in which capacity she repeatedly brushed shoulders with retired US general Ben Hodges, a major cheerleader of proxy warfare in Ukraine.
By 2019, Podolyak became an assistant to Oksana Syroyid, a leader of the “Samopomich” (Self Reliance) party and deputy chair of the Ukrainian parliament. Melanie Podolyak reportedly also advised the international department of this pro-Western political party, which was wiped out in the 2019 parliamentary elections. “Low polling doesn’t stop Self Reliance from being every allied embassy’s reform favorites,” observed Jonathan Brunson, a “political warfare analyst” with an eye on the far-right in Ukraine.
Later that year, Podolyak probably took part in Gonor’s new “Academy of Street Protest” featuring Sternenko, Filimonov, and Potashenkov. In any case, she started to wear a shirt from the Gonor “Academy,” the symbol of which is a Molotov cocktail. “Son of Perun” and “Malyar” then visited Hong Kong in December 2019 to engage in “protest tourism.” Filimonov shared a picture of himself at a demonstration wearing his “Who Killed Katya Handziuk” shirt. He captioned his Instagram post in English: “Fight for Freedom!! Stand with Hong Kong!!”
In 2019, the Ukrainian School of Political Studies (USPS) created an annual scholarship to honor the memory of its 2015 graduate Kateryna Handziuk. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, “Son of Perun” had to wait until 2021 to become the second recipient of the Handziuk scholarship. According to the USPS, “Filimonov’s activity matches Ukrainian School of Political Studies values. By his work, Serhiy, like Katya Handziuk, defends the interests of the democratic state of Ukraine.” The Council of Europe, “the continent’s leading human rights organization” — not to be confused with the EU’s European Council — funds the USPS, which is proud to be associated with several people in Filimonov’s orbit.
The USPS awarded Filimonov the scholarship in July 2021, evidently for a summer program. Earlier that year, Filimonov was detained for “hooliganism,” and placed under house arrest, after a mob of Sternenko supporters assaulted the presidential administration building, to protest a prison sentence of seven years for their hero’s kidnapping of a local politician in 2015. Later that year, a court commuted this sentence, and according to Sternenko, the president even offered to make him the head of the Odessa department of the Security Service of Ukraine.
“Happy birthday Serhii Sternenko,” Melanie Podolyak captioned a Facebook post with her pictures from the incident. The day before Sternenko supporters smashed the front doors, heavily graffitied the facade, and burned the entrance sign to the presidential administration building, she promoted the insurrection with a long Facebook post accompanied by an illustration of a flamethrower. Filimonov reportedly gave the signal for the mob to attack the building by lighting a flare. “Serhiy is ‘guilty’ only because in 2014 he decided that he was ready to spend his youth not just having fun and hanging out,” insisted Podolyak.
Volodymyr Ishchenko commented on the situation a couple days later, “Western officials and embassies still have not condemned the far-right assault on Ukraine’s presidential office by Sternenko supporters. A reason for this is that the West has supported some of the coordinators of the rally and many of the participants, including financially.”
Filimonov and Sternenko were both represented in court by Masi Nayem, “the lawyer for Ukraine’s national patriotic revolutionary far right,” whose elder sibling Mustafa is a “top Sorosite” credited with launching the “Euromaidan” protest movement in 2013. These Afghan-Ukrainian brothers also have a sister, Mariam, who claims to be “decolonizing the discourse about Ukraine.” As someone on Twitter/X once said, “her whole shtick is diversitywashing Ukrainian nationalism and denying racism exists in Ukraine because she’s never personally experienced it.”
Yaroslav Yurchsyhyn, the former executive director of Transparency International Ukraine (2016–19), is another “anti-corruption activist” and radical liberal-nationalist who came to the rescue of the Sternenko rioters and Gonor hooligans. He participated in the rally and offered to bail out its arrested leaders. Yurchyshyn graduated from the USPS alongside Kateryna Handziuk, and championed the campaign to bring her killers to justice. In 2018, he posed for a picture with Angela Merkel, both of them holding up a shirt that said “Who is Behind the Assault on Kateryna Handziuk?” Since 2019, Yurchsyhyn has been a prominent member of the “Holos” (Voice) party in the Ukrainian parliament, in which it apparently replaced Self Reliance as the “embassy’s favorite.”
Less than a month after the assault on the presidential office, Serhii Filimonov said in an interview, “I am sure that someday social elevators will work normally and we will be able to see many people from the [football] fan movement in the Verkhovna Rada [parliament], in the Cabinet of Ministers.” Around this time, his old friend Andriy Malkov took a picture with a huge banner that was unfurled in Kyiv to honor the Ukrainian division of the Nazi Waffen-SS.
Alina Mykhailova, another far-right influencer, soon joined “Son of Perun” at the Ukrainian School of Political Studies. She’s a famous military medic formerly affiliated with the military wing of the Right Sector movement, which formed the 67th Mechanized Brigade in 2022. Her boyfriend, Dmytro “Da Vinci” Kotsiubailo (1995–2023), was a rising military star from the Right Sector. Later that year, a few months before Putin launched his “special military operation,” Zelensky awarded Kotsuibailo the country’s highest honor and decreed him a “Hero of Ukraine.” Gonor soon formed a special company in Kotsuibailo’s “Da Vinci Wolves” battalion. Mykhailova might have brokered this merger.
In 2019, Alina Mykhailova visited Washington, DC as a participant of the Open World Program (for Ukrainian youth leaders) which is funded by Congress to facilitate “the only exchange program within the US legislative branch.” That year she became an assistant to Rustem Umyerov, a member of parliament from the Holos party, and now the Minister of Defense. Mykhailova also started to work at the Ukrainian Leadership Academy, said to be the country’s “most sizable youth leadership movement,” which was established by the “leading private equity fund in Ukraine” (Western NIS Enterprise) after the so-called “Revolution of Dignity.”
In 2020, Mykhailova was elected to the Kyiv City Council as a member of Holos. She became one of the most oppositional deputies and apparently a favorite politician of young liberals in the capital. Meanwhile she worked as an assistant to Oleksandra Ustinova — like Yurchyshyn, another USPS graduate, former “anti-corruption activist,” and Holos deputy in parliament since 2019. Mykhailova and “Son of Perun” appear to have become friends at the Ukrainian School of Political Studies.
The Council of Europe established the USPS with the Agency for Legislative Initiatives (ALI), “one of the leading think tanks in Ukraine,” which is funded by Global Affairs Canada, USAID, the European Union, the Council of Europe, and George Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation. According to the ALI website, “Under the auspices of the Council of Europe, this [Ukrainian School of Political Studies] is an education and networking project of the Agency for Legislative Initiatives, which aims at training and uniting leaders from various settings who share a desire to cultivate a strong state.” As for Filimonov, he said the USPS is “creating a community that can influence processes on a national scale. I’m very happy that I have the honor to be one of its members.”
In September 2021, a Ukrainian gangster movie, “Rhino,” premiered at the Venice Film Festival, starring Serhii Filimonov in his debut acting performance. Oleg Sentsov, a liberal nationalist icon formerly imprisoned in Russia (2014–19), directed the film and got Filimonov the role. Sentsov’s wife, Veronika Velch, is an “Advocacy Director” for Juleanna Glover, a right-wing “high-powered PR consultant” who reportedly “stands at the nexus of social and political Washington.” In 2023, Velch joined a meeting at the Ukrainian embassy in Washington between the Ukrainian ambassador and representatives of the Azov movement. Almost a year later, the ambassador suggested that Veronika Velch deserves credit for playing a role in the lobbying campaign that preceded the State Department’s approval of the Azov Brigade to receive US weapons and training.
Days after his appearance in Venice, “Son of Perun” celebrated his 27th birthday and started studying “public management and administration” — with Melanie Podolyak and Alina Mykhailova— at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. They received congratulations online from Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, and in person from Serhiy Prytula, a politician who left the Holos party a few months earlier.
Prytula wasn’t ranked high enough on the party list to enter parliament in 2019, and the following year got less than 8% of votes as the Holos candidate in Kyiv’s mayoral election. A 2020 Ukrainska Pravda article on “Who is Preparing Prytula for the Elections” said that his headquarters was staffed “mainly from among the participants of the ‘Who killed Kateryna Gandzyuk’ movement.”
A year after the Russian invasion, by which time the Prytula Foundation was a major fundraiser for the Ukrainian military working with Sternenko, a poll commissioned by the US-funded National Endowment for Democracy suggested that a new party led by Prytula would defeat Zelensky’s ruling “Servant of the People” and win a snap parliamentary election.
A more recent poll indicated that Serhiy Prytula is still a very unpopular presidential candidate, but Leonid Ragozin, one of the only journalists that keeps tabs on the far-right in Ukraine, said over a year ago that Prytula “appears to be seen as a replacement for Zelensky in various quarters.” And here is another comment from Ragozin about Prytula: “Backed by DC hawks, he runs his own troll/bot factory, one of the most unhinged.”
(I got a taste of Prytula’s troll army after I made a popular Twitter thread about the far-right connections of his wartime staffer Melanie Podolyak. A blogger associated with Prytula, according to that 2020 UP article, posted a picture of me and declared, “This person hacked into primary school zoom class and demonstrated his penis to underage children. Be aware!”)
The Ukrainian premier of “Rhino” arrived in February 2022, just over a week before Russia invaded. At that time, Melanie Podolyak and Alina Mykhailova were visiting Berlin. A few days earlier, Filimonov and Sternenko were among the lead organizers of a march in Kyiv, one without party flags that declared “Ukrainians Will Resist!” This slogan threatened to turn against Zelensky’s government if it tried to “capitulate” at the negotiating table with Russia. Meanwhile in northeastern Ukraine, the Azov movement led a similar march in Russian-speaking Kharkov, which the Western media and Ukrainian “civil society” celebrated as a heartwarming display of patriotism and national unity. Around that time, the star of “Rhino” gave an interesting interview.
And yet, you must have had some kind of evolution in your views? You’ve had a swastika tattoo since you were what, 17?
Tattoos are the culture of football fans. At the sector, when I got there, it was fashionable to have one like this. And many of the guys from Gonor, whose tattoos scare the foreign press, got these tattoos 8–10 years ago. And in fact, their meaning is definitely not xenophobic or racist, it’s a protest. Something that is forbidden. In addition, those who are interested know that Gonor are pagans. And many symbols that can scare people are actually related to our religion.
…
Do you see a political career for yourself?
I definitely don’t have a goal of becoming an MP or a member of the Kyiv City Council. But if there is a strong team that needs my help, I will join it.
On the eve of the Russian invasion, Serhii Sternenko and Melanie Podolyak appeared on Fox News for live interviews. Podolyak made it back at least three more times by the end of March. When the war started, she went to work for Serhiy Prytula. Podolyak reportedly “helped organize and headed the humanitarian staff of the Prytula Foundation in Lviv.” Later she started to advise the charity on “international relations,” and served as the project manager of Prytula’s NEST Fund to help families whose homes have been destroyed. In the meantime, as the war raged in Ukraine, Sternenko rapidly grew his online audience, and “Son of Perun” grew close to “Da Vinci.”
The Da Vinci Wolves battalion and its Gonor company became elite forces in the Ukrainian military. In April 2022, the USPS proudly explained that Filimonov’s group “coordinates its activities” with the Ministry of Defense and Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). In 2024, a Ukrainian state propaganda outfit referred to the “Da Vinci Wolves” as one of the “top 5” Ukrainian “super-units,” along with three others from the Azov movement.
In 2022, Serhii Filimonov was injured, and Alina Mykhailova addressed the Council of Europe’s World Forum for Democracy as part of the USPS delegation to this annual event. In 2023, Dmytro Kotsuibailo was killed, and received a high-profile state funeral. Not long after Alina Mykhailova met Volodymyr Zelensky and gave him a chevron worn by “Da Vinci,” a napping soldier from Kotsuibailo’s unit sparked a scandal after the Ministry of Defense shared a photo of him on Twitter and people noticed a neo-Nazi patch from the notorious far-right band “Death in June.” This image even instigated an unusual article in the New York Times about “Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines.”
Later that year, Sternenko’s former defense attorney Andrii Pysarenko, a USPS graduate who became an officer in Gonor’s military unit, also made a speech at the World Forum for Democracy. In the meantime, Melanie Podolyak’s wartime boyfriend died — Andriy Pilshchykov, a fighter pilot with the call sign “Juice.” He got this nickname several years ago in the United States (due to his abstention from alcohol) while completing an internship with the California Air National Guard. Pilshchykov also started to give interviews to U.S. news network in early 2022. Although he died in an accident, he became a sort of martyr for those lobbying Washington to send F-16 fighter planes to Ukraine.
“Juice” was buried alongside “Da Vinci” in Askold’s Grave, a historic park in Kyiv. Melanie Podolyak and Alina Mykhailova regularly pay tribute to the young men whose famous deaths likely sowed the seeds of their future political careers. Last year, Mykhailova petitioned Zelensky to create a “National Pantheon of Heroes” at Askold’s Grave, which would also become the final resting place for pro-Nazi Ukrainian leaders such as Stepan Bandera, Yevhen Konovalets, and Pavlo Skoropadsky. The USAID-funded Reanimation Package of Reforms Coalition, the “largest and most visible reform network” in Ukraine, already supported this idea for years.
Earlier this summer, my favorite blog, “Events in Ukraine” by Peter Korotaev, published an amazing three part series about Ukraine’s scam call centers, or “Offices,” that touched on Gonor’s stake in this massive criminal enterprise in which “a variety of famous neonazi nationalist war veterans occupy top positions.” (In his February 2022 interview, Filimonov claimed “I have no idea about gangster life, unlike the hero of the film [Rhino].”)
In June 2023, “Son of Perun” and “Malyar” were spotted at a private party with strippers held by a call center in Dnipro, the “scammer capital of Ukraine.” Since then, Filimonov has taken two pictures with the SBU chief Vasyl Malyuk. According to Korotaev, “Ukrainian Secret Services and nationalists (the two are inseparable themselves) are at the top of the Office pyramid.” Furthermore, “a truly powerful coalition has emerged between Ukraine’s military neonazis, scam call centres, and western-financed journalists and liberal ‘activists’.” Peter Korotaev warns that “a new oligarchy is rising,” but cautions against “any over-ideologization of splits among the right.”
Generally, it’s all a matter of turf wars over criminal incomes. Gonor originally split from Azov in 2018 over a disagreement about an anti-construction action — it is well-known that practically all such ‘protests’ are paid for by rival construction firms. My first article in this call center series explored how Azov originally began as the street muscle for the Kharkov oligarch Arsen Avakov, and how a great deal of Azovites were uncovered running violent racketeering ‘business’ in the very same city in 2021.
Sternenko’s conflict with Azov allegedly started as a turf war. Korotaev explains that Arsen Avakov was “the quintessential ‘deep-state’ figure who ruled the ministry of internal affairs from 2014–2021,” and in those days sat “at the top of the vast pyramid of rightwing paramilitaries, all of whom up to their neck in blood and criminal activities.” When Filimonov fell out with Biletsky, Gonor turned against Azov’s powerful patron, and supported the “Avakov is the Devil” protests led by Sternenko and his friends. Fear of Avakov’s “private armies” partially drove Kyiv’s liberal activists into the Nazi tattooed arms of Gonor. As we’ve already heard one of them say, “I had a very cautious optimism” when these former Azovites “created their own civilized NGO, and began to cooperate with healthy civil society forces.”
Another conflict on the right erupted in early 2024, when Serhii Filimonov led a breakaway group from Dmytro Kotsuibailo’s battalion and formed a new “Da Vinci Wolves,” with Alina Mykhailova at the head of its medical service. A few days before this Right Sector-Gonor conflict spilled into the open, Mykhailova received a “Light of Justice” award from the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. The other recipient was Kateryna Prokopenko, the wife of Azov Brigade commander Denys Prokopenko — a former White Boys Club hooligan, now a “Hero of Ukraine.” In her speech, Kyiv City Council deputy Alina Mykhailova quoted the Ukrainian fascist leader Stepan Bandera (1909–59) and hoped for victory in “the internal battle and our common effort.”
Gonor left Right Sector’s 67th Mechanized Brigade and transferred to the 59th Motorized Brigade, taking their entire battalion’s social media accounts with them. Since then, the Right Sector movement was allegedly purged from the 67th brigade. (Kateryna Gandziuk was reportedly attacked by veterans of Right Sector’s former military wing, the Volunteer Ukrainian Corps. As the analyst Jonathan Brunson summarized that case, “Corrupt local officials paid Right Sector thugs for hire to attack Right Sector sympathizer and Ukrainian patriot Handziuk. Right Sector guy [Sternenko] leads movement to solve her murder.”)
At the start of 2024, Mykhailova and “Son of Perun” opened a recruitment center for the new Da Vinci Wolves in Lviv. Andriy Sadovyi, the longtime mayor of Lviv and former leader of the Self Reliance party, spoke at the grand opening. Back in 2021, he met with them as USPS students. The Ukrainian School of Political Studies was proud to announce that Filimonov became the new Da Vinci Wolves commander. But there wasn’t a full battalion yet, which explains the need for a recruitment center and major advertising campaign in the capital. Who paid for this?
About a month before they left the 67th brigade, Mykhailova and Filimonov attended a conference for USPS alumni with Oleksandr Yabchanka, who subsequently succeeded “Son of Perun” as the commander of the Gonor company in the new Da Vinci Wolves. In 2018–19, Yabchanka was a spokesperson for the Ministry of Health, when it was led by the liberal nationalist icon, Ulana Suprun. From 2014–18, Yabchanka led the healthcare reform group in the aforementioned Reanimation Package of Reforms Coalition. Since 2020, he’s taught at the Ukrainian Catholic University, “where he prepares masters in public administration” — for example: Filimonov, Podolyak, and Mykhailova.
Ulana Suprun, an important Sternenko ally from the United States, is a friend of the far-right in Ukraine, but not universally. Andriy Malkov was happy to take his picture with her years ago, but over a month before “Nation Europa,” his co-organizer Yuriy Pavlyshyn, the bass guitar player from M8L8TH, denounced the “Soros children, Suprunyata, LGBT, NATO, etc.” In a post he titled “Trenchocracy” (Trincerocrazia, which he got from Mussolini), Pavlyshyn predicted an inevitable political defeat for Ukraine, and advocated for a dictatorship of the “military elites,” because otherwise “there will be a dictatorship anyway, either a Kremlin one or a leftist ‘Western’ one, which they hypocritically call ‘democracy.’”
Soros children, Suprunyata, LGBT, NATO, etc. these are, in one way or another, all manifestations of tools of influence and the imposition of a left-wing dictatorship. […] I won’t delve into my view of the utopian nature of any form of “democracy,” but I’ll simply say that I dream of voting rights only for those with military service, of allowing travel abroad only for those with a military ID, and so on. Because the true elites of our eternal Ukraine are now in trenches and bunkers, in underground headquarters and stabilization points.
Whereas Yuriy Pavlyshyn is a medic in the 3rd Assault Brigade, the head of its medical service, Viktoria Kovach, is getting the Gonor treatment. In 2024, she joined the Ukrainian School of Political Studies, and visited the NATO headquarters in Brussels.
Around the time that stops on the 3rd Assault Brigade’s summer tour of Europe were getting cancelled, Serhii Sternenko and Melanie Podolyak took a group photo with Vadym Voroshylov, another far-right influencer, and Kirill Lyukov, another Prytula volunteer. Voroshylov, better known as “Karaya,” is a fighter pilot who took his call-sign from the German Nazi fighter ace Erich Hartmann. A year before this photo, Lyukov celebrated his birthday with “Leo,” one of the fighters from the 3rd Assault Brigade who participated in the 2024 summer tour.
As the summer came to an end, Podolyak moderated a youth forum with Sternenko in Lviv, which brought out hundreds of people to listen to these nationalist “activists” talk about military technology. In early October, Sternenko attended a meeting with Rustem Umerov, the Minister of Defense, to discuss “the problems that still exist in the field of UAV [Unmanned Aerial Vehicle] contracting and development.” According to Sternenko, thanks to his efforts, the Ukrainian military has received more than 100,000 drones. He’s also collaborated with United24, the fundraising platform launched by the President of Ukraine.
Melanie Podolyak was later interviewed by “Grunt Media,” a platform established in 2022 that has accumulated over half a million followers across Youtube, Telegram, Twitter/X, and Instagram. “If you’re on Twitter, you’ve seen Melania, if you watch Ukrainian YouTube, you’ve seen Melania, if you’ve been to rallies for justice, you’ve seen Melania,” according to “Grunt,” which means “Soil.” The interview was conducted by Grunt Media co-founder Anton Hodza, who once said that I “demonstrated my penis to underage children.”
Azovites have bristled at Sternenko’s rising star, in part because his status as a major fundraiser and social media influencer has shielded this famous militarist from serving at the frontlines. (He allegedly joined the Gonor company at the start of the war, but it’s unclear if he did any fighting in that capacity.) Less than a month after the meeting with Umerov, Sternenko was put on a wanted list for evading military service, which he alleged came as a direct order from the commander-in-chief of the armed forces (Oleksandr Syrskyi) in retaliation for Sternenko advocating military reforms. Roughly 24 hours later, Syrskyi held a meeting with Sternenko and others, including his friend and like-minded blogger, Ihor Lachenkov, aka “Lachen.” Peter Korotaev writes on “Events in Ukraine,”
Lachen, like Sternenko or Prytula, perfectly encapsulates this class of ‘military activists’, untouchable heroes of the Nation who live for war, whose moralism covers over their quite less savory means of making money. Not that earning money of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people is much to be proud of either. Their power and influence has truly skyrocketed since 2022. While there were whispers of how western structures were preparing them for the presidency before, the war years have propelled them from relatively fringe figures to entirely potent candidates.
In a previous post, I suggested that the liberal-nationalist alliance with right-wing extremists is a ticking time bomb, but on second thought I’m not comfortable predicting the future in Ukraine. Consider once again the case of Melanie Podolyak, who has befriended hardcore neo-Nazis from Gonor and Azov’s 3rd Assault Brigade. But how do neo-Nazi war veterans react at this point, the next time they’re rejected by voters? Would they risk it all for a coup, or fall in line behind the next regime? Of course, there are other possibilities. Which way, Ukrainian hooligan? (Whatever you say, Lt. General Budanov…?)
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But wait, there’s more!
Bandera Lobby P.S.
We’ve already established on this Substack that Ulana Suprun is an OUN-B member. But Yaroslav Yurchyshyn is a “liberal-nationalist” Banderite politician that I’ve failed to give proper attention. More about him coming soon.
In 2016, Adrian Karatnycky of the Atlantic Council claimed that the OUN-B is led by “smart, modern and democratic people.” For the 110th anniversary of the birth of Stepan Bandera, on the eve of 2019, the “Ukrainian Information Service” of OUN-B published a video (with English subtitles) that upset some far-right nationalists in Ukraine, including the head of the Nazi-infested Right Sector movement.
“There is no basis upon which to equate his [Bandera’s] name with various forms of hatred, be it class or race based, nor with evil ideologies or symbols,” said the narrator of the OUN-B video. It showed neo-Nazis marching in Ukraine, including from the “Svoboda” party, “Karpatska Sich,” and the German neo-Nazi group, “Der Dritte Weg,” which co-founded “Nation Europa.” The video cut to a clip of young neo-Nazis marching in 2012 Kharkiv, a city in eastern Ukraine from which the Azov movement largely originated, chanting “Seig Heil! Rudolf Hess, Hitler Youth, SS!”
The OUN-Banderites explained, “In times of independence, the characteristics of Ukrainian nationalism is state-building.” (They might say that Gonor is a “state-building” movement for football hooligans.) The video suggested that Ulana Suprun, as the Minister of Healthcare, was a more effective champion of Stepan Bandera’s legacy than rowdy far-right nationalists, with a picture of her speaking at the 2017 Ukraine Reform Conference in London. “It may not be the state that we want, but following the Revolution of Dignity we are on the right path.”
Yuriy Noevy from the Svoboda party, which includes high-ranking OUN-B members, made a long Facebook post denouncing the OUN-B’s statement and video, which was “based on a hostile and neocolonial vocabulary and theses of liberalism … Does it matter that Bandera was not a liberal, but a nationalist?” Noevy observed that since 1991, the OUN-B “lost its monopoly on Bandera’s legacy.” For him, this latest incident appeared to be the final nail in the coffin. Ruslan Andriyko, the party’s head of youth policy, fumed at the “ideological, ultra-liberal, anti-nationalist subversion of the OUN on the 110th anniversary of Stepan Bandera's birth.”
A knife in the back of modern nationalists. We will not forget. We will not forgive.
Yuriy Mykhalchyshyn, a neo-Nazi ideologist who left Svoboda and joined the Azov movement, commented, “You say that, as if they once had it in the last decade, this ‘monopoly.’ We didn’t even consider them to be people.”
In the coming weeks, with the rise to power of Volodymyr Zelensky, the OUN-B changed its tune about “discussions of a new ‘Maidan’ and a ‘real’ revolution” posing a threat to Ukrainian national security. Now the card-carrying Banderites joined militant far-right “activists” in threatening to overthrow Zelensky if he “capitulated” to Russia, or if he tried to undo the “progress” made by “state-building” nationalists since 2014. As readers of this blog know, the OUN-B spearheaded the “Capitulation Resistance Movement” in 2019, which by 2022 worked with Sternenko and Gonor to send the message to Zelensky: “Ukrainians Will Resist!”
Almost three years later, while neo-Nazi fighters warm up to the necessity of a ceasefire, the OUN-Banderites and radical “liberal-nationalists” are holding steadfast against any talk of peace. But the OUN-B has also welcomed the Azovites into their Pantheon of Heroes. On Christmas Eve, OUN-B leader Oleh Medunytsia even highlighted actions by Nation Europa’s representatives in Bulgaria and Albania, dedicated to the “Ukrainian nationalists” from Azov, which largely consists of Russian-speaking pagan neo-Nazis. According to Medunytsia, “We play the role of an ideological core in the struggle,” but the Nazis have declared the future of Ukraine belongs to them. In World War II, these agendas turned out to be incompatible, however the Banderites seem more optimistic about World War III.
Thank you, Moss! Here's to the New Year, all the best for you in 2025! Too bad this article is not shareable on pro-Nazi Facebook, it will be immediately banned either for "hate speech, attacking people for who they are" or "promoting dangerous individuals". It is AMAZING that the West closes its eyes on the unhinged triumph of Nazism - be it Ukrainian, Jewish or German or American. And cheers on the head-chopping ISIS bandits in charge of Syria!
Grim stuff, but I can still find hope to wish the best to you for the new year!