World League of 'Bandera Youth'
OUN Front of the Month: the Ukrainian Youth Association
In November 2022, the Ukrainian Youth Association, also known as “Soom,” (SUM—Spilka ukrayinsʹkoyi molod—or CYM—Спілка української молод) held its 20th World Congress in Hanover Township, New Jersey. Supposedly an “isolationist” attitude dominated: CYM, despite its plummeting membership, “should be for privileged people only.” Refugees need not apply. Don’t bother reaching out to more active groups. “The other organizations should beg CYM for cooperation.”
At the top of the agenda was reaffirming a secretive far-right cult’s control of the international leadership of CYM for the upcoming five years. Functionaries from the OUN-B, or Banderite wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, appear to have formed at least half of the 2022-2027 World Executive of CYM. Some of them undoubtedly grew up reading the Banderite CYM magazine, “Vanguard” (Avanhard). The OUN-B, of course, helped to perpetrate the Holocaust in Ukraine.
CYM is what the Banderites call a “facade structure,” a term that appears in the book “OUN Banderivtsi: fragments of activity and struggle” by Sviatoslav Lypovetsky, deputy chairman of the CYM World Executive. The Ukrainian Youth Association is integral to what used to be called the “World Ukrainian Liberation Front.” A decade ago, Andriy Bihun, now the leader of CYM—seen above, standing front and center in the group photo—became the second deputy chairman of this global coordinating body of OUN-B front groups, or fasadni struktury.
Peter Duma, the international communications director of CYM—also pictured above, standing on the left in front of Lypovetsky—is the brother of Jaroslav Duma, the “Land Leader” of OUN-B in Australia and Honorary Consul of Ukraine in Sydney, who has depicted the Ukrainian Youth Association, OUN-B, and its “Conference of Ukrainian Statehood Organizations” (another name for the “World Ukrainian Liberation Front”) as cogs in a Banderite machine.
Just over 50 delegates participated in the World Congress on behalf of CYM branches in Ukraine, Estonia, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Britain, Australia, Canada, and the United States. After years of singing, “now a SUMivtsya,” (member of CYM) “tomorrow a fighter,” CYM adopted a new slogan for the upcoming year: “now a fighter.” In 2023 the organization vowed to commemorate the 140th birthday of Dmytro Dontsov (1883-1973), a fascist ideologue who translated Mein Kampf.
The proceedings included a minute of silence for CYM members who died since the last World Congress in 2016, which also took place in Hanover Township. This included Omelian Koval (1920-2019), the “long-term Land Leader” of OUN-B in Belgium; Vera Haidamakha (1947-2021), a founding figure of CYM in 1990s Ukraine; and Mykhailo Dimitrov (1983-2018), who died in eastern Ukraine fighting with the extremist Right Sector battalion. Haidamakha was survived by her Belgian-born husband, the first OUN-B leader to come from the Ukrainian diaspora and CYM.
This installment of the Bandera Lobby Blog will take a closer look at the Ukrainian Youth Association in Australia, Canada, Ukraine, and the United States. Although the Canadians are in the spotlight now, it makes sense to start with the Australian Banderites, who are probably the most transparent, because one of their CYM leaders succeeded Mr. Haidamakha as the head of OUN-B from 2009 until a month after the 2022 World Congress.
Australia
Longtime readers of the Bandera Lobby Blog may remember that George Borec, a veteran of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the 1940s military wing of OUN-B, got a street in Penrith, Australia named after Stepan Bandera, and financed the construction of a nearby Banderite youth center in a suburb of Sydney. The local branch of CYM has since relocated to a newer building, where visitors are greeted at the front entrance by portraits of far-right OUN leaders (Bandera, Konovalets, Shukhevych, Stetsko) and Symon Petliura, a World War I-era figure whose military forces carried out pogroms against Jews.
After a former president of CYM-Australia died suddenly in 2015, the national executive of CYM announced the creation of the Wasyl Senko Perpetual Education Fund. CYM-Australia held the first Wasyl Senko Leadership and Education Conference on the 75th anniversary of the OUN-B’s declaration of a pro-Nazi government on June 30, 1941 in German-occupied western Ukraine.
CYM-Australia secretary Markian Stefanyshyn, one of the “30 Under 30” highlighted by the Ukrainian World Congress in 2021, made a Powerpoint presentation about the relationship of CYM and OUN-B for the 2019 “leadership and education conference.” One slide from this lecture can be seen above. Another, titled “Purpose of OUN,” explained that today, “the task of the Ukrainian nationalists is to help Ukraine in its development as a mighty state, so that it retains its independence and becomes a nation at the level of the other powerful powers of the world.”
Marko Tkaczuk, the Australian president of CYM, chaired the nominations committee at the 2022 World Congress in New Jersey. His wife Nadia is the chief educator of CYM in Australia, and his brother Stepan is the treasurer. They belong to the “Stepan Bandera branch” of CYM in Geelong, Australia.
Marko and Stepan’s father Marian led the “Roman Shukhevych branch” of CYM in Sydney (which is named for an ethnic cleanser and Nazi collaborator) and chaired the youth wing of the Nazi-infested World Anti-Communist League. Valeriy Chobotar, a former leader of an OUN-B paramilitary group in Ukraine more recently affiliated with the Nazi-infested paramilitary of the Right Sector movement, is a close friend of the Tkaczuk family, which is just one of several Banderite clans in Australia.
A month after the World Congress, OUN-B held its 15th Grand Assembly in Kyiv to inaugurate a new Providnyk, or “Leader.” Since 2009, Stefan Romaniw of Melbourne, Australia had worn the crown. He was the Australian president of CYM in 1984-96, married into a huge Banderite family, and delivered the official “words of farewell from Ukrainian youth” at the funeral of OUN-B leader Yaroslav Stetsko in Munich, West Germany—Stetsko, who became “Prime Minister” on June 30, 1941.
The CYM is tied to the Australian League for a Free Ukraine, originally known as the Ukrainian Anti-Bolshevik League, which spearheaded Stetsko’s Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (“the largest and most important umbrella of former Nazi collaborators in the world”) and the “Ukrainian Liberation Front” in Australia. The Australian Banderite “League” used to publish a magazine, “Our Front” (Nash Front). The organization still exists under the leadership of Romaniw’s brother-in-law.
Not long after the WHO declared COVID-19 to be a global health emergency and pandemic, the OUN-B formed a committee in early 2020 to prepare the publication of a collection of writings of Stepan Bandera. The publishing committee included Yuriy Syrotiuk, the deputy chairman of the far-right Svoboda party responsible for political education, and the chief organizer of the annual “Bandera Readings” in Kyiv. Svoboda ideologist Oleksandr Sych, another OUN-B member who has written openly about its use of “facade structures,” authored the preface to the book.
A presentation of the new Bandera book was a highlight of the 2021 “Bandera Readings,” during which the leader of the violent far-right organization “Tradition and Order” spoke after a pre-recorded speech by Australian OUN-B chief Stefan Romaniw. The production of the Bandera book was largely financed by foreign Banderites, such as Tatiana Zachariak, the former chief education officer of CYM-Australia who chairs the Association of Ukrainians in Victoria. The project also received financial support from Toronto, in particular the BCU Foundation and Ucrainica Research Institute—fellow travelers of CYM-Canada in the “World Ukrainian Liberation Front.”
Canada
The Canadian president of CYM chaired the presidium of the World Congress, and the elder executive director of CYM-Canada chaired the financial committee.
The Ukrainian Youth Association is a cornerstone of the “Canadian Conference in Support of Ukraine” (CCSU), a politically influential coalition of OUN-B front groups also known as the “Ukrainian Statehood Organizations of Canada.” CYM functions as the youth wing of the League of Ukrainian Canadians, the tip of the spear, with its slogan, “In the Vanguard of Ukrainian Affairs.” Over a decade ago, the Banderite CCSU leaders publicly “demand[ed] that enemy agents of Moscow’s fifth column be deported from Ukraine.”
The largest chapter of CYM-Canada is named after Yuriy Shukhevych, the son of OUN-B military leader Roman Shukhevych who became a famous Soviet political prisoner, and later a far-right politician in Ukraine. The Yuriy Shukheyvch chapter is located in Mississauga, a city neighboring Toronto and the town of Oakville, which has a Ukrainian cemetery with monuments dedicated to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (commanded by Roman Shukhevych) and the Nazi Waffen-SS Galician Division. Between Mississauga and Toronto is the suburb of Etobicoke, where the Canadian headquarters of OUN-B is located.
The Etobicoke branch of CYM is named after Symon Petliura, the World War I-era Ukrainian leader assassinated by “the Jewish NKVD agent,” or so we are told by the Etobicoke section on the “CYMnet,” the original website of the Ukrainian Youth Association. The homepage of the Etobicoke branch has pictures of young CYM members paying tribute to OUN-B leader Yaroslav Stetsko (1912-86). The Banderite “cultural center” in Etobicoke displays multiple portraits of Bandera, Shukhevych, Stetsko, and other Ukrainian nationalists.
The Yuri Lypa Ukrainian Heritage Academy in Etobicoke is a Saturday school affiliated with CYM that is named for a racist ideologue of the OUN. According to its website, which is currently offline, the school is “one of the constituent organizations of the [OUN-B] Statehood Front.” The principal, Oksana Sokolyk, is the editor of the Canadian OUN-B newspaper Homin Ukrainy, which has been subsidized by the government for more than a decade.
In 2021, the OUN-B in Canada commemorated the 80th anniversary of Stetsko’s “renewal of Ukrainian statehood” on June 30, 1941. Homin Ukrainy published a special issue about this with a statement from the “Ukrainian Statehood Organizations of Canada” on the front page. CYM sponsored a lecture by OUN-B member Mykola Posivnych, the leader in Lviv of a far-right political party (Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists) who chaired the publishing committee behind that year’s book of Bandera writings. A year before, Posivnych republished Stetsko’s book, “June 30, 1941,” with financial support of the same OUN-B front groups in Canada that are dominated by second or third-generation Banderites raised in CYM.
According to historian Per Rudling, the “Roman Shukheyvch Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex” affiliated with CYM in Edmonton, Alberta was opened in 1973 with significant funding from the provincial government. In 2020, he explained, “The purpose of the complex, the OUN(b) press declared, was to ‘become a blacksmith’s forge, which will forge hard, unbreakable characters of the Ukrainian youth’ and to ‘raise and harden a new generation of fighters for the liberation of Ukraine…’” Meanwhile, I reported that the federal government awarded the Banderites $279,138 to “repair” the complex in 2015, and CYM-Canada charged to the defense of the Ukrainian Waffen-SS monument in Oakville after it became the subject of an international news story.
They’ve been much more quiet about the recent “Nazigate” scandal…
Ukraine
The CYM delegation from Ukraine at the 2022 World Congress in New Jersey appears to have been led by Viktor Yahun, a retired Major General and former deputy director of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). He received a special award from CYM, the highest honor for a teacher. A couple months later, Yahun spoke to The Guardian about “the urgent need for a cleanout of the country’s key security service.”
Maj Gen Viktor Yahun, who was deputy head of the SBU until 2015, said there needed to be a thorough cleanout of the service, which he said had long had an overly close relationship with its Russian counterpart, the FSB… As late as 2010, Yahun said the SBU had internally celebrated KGB Day, marking the establishment of the communist-era Russian secret service, and there remained pro-Russian agents through the ranks of the service… While the generation that worked for the Soviet security services had retired, Yahun added, the recruitment practices of the SBU meant that their sons and daughters were now in the agency… Yahun said some SBU agents had been bribed and blackmailed into working for Russia, while others were double agents. “Others just regard themselves as Russian,” he said.
According to his Ukrainian Wikipedia page, Yahun was dismissed from the agency in December 2013 for meeting with the newly formed Right Sector, and subsequently worked in a special department of the “Maidan Self-Defense,” before returning to the SBU under the nationalist leadership of Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, a friend of the founder of Right Sector.
OUN-B leader Stefan Romaniw sent greetings from Australia to the last National Congress of CYM in Ukraine, where it allegedly only has about 300 members. Several dozen have fought in the current war, and some have died, such as Oleh Yurchenko. A day after Yurchenko was killed in Bakhmut, the OUN-B leadership announced that he’d been a member of their Organization since 2010 and joined its national executive in Ukraine. According to this statement, Yurchenko also had “leadership positions” in the SBU since 2014.
This provided some context to the special attention he received. “Another huge loss for the Ukrainian people…” said the (Banderite-led) Ukrainian World Congress, which noted that Yurchenko joined CYM “as a mature adult.” The Ukrainian government’s (Banderite-infiltrated) Institute of National Memory also memorialized Yurchenko, and mentioned that he was a member of OUN-B.
In Ukraine, CYM originated in the nationalist Union of Independent Ukrainian Youth (SNUM, est. 1989), which parted ways with an extremist faction that ultimately co-founded the far-right organization, UNA-UNSO. At the first World Congress of Ukrainian Youth Organizations in 1990, what you might call the “radical democratic-nationalist” leadership of SNUM were introduced to representatives of the OUN-B affiliated Ukrainian Youth Association, including the wife of the aforementioned “elder executive director of CYM-Canada.”
In 1991, SNUM was reformed as the official branch of CYM in Ukraine. From 2005 through 2016, it received over $400,000 in grants from the U.S. State Department via the National Endowment for Democracy. From 2016 until 2019, CYM and another, more radical OUN-B youth group in Ukraine were members of the Reanimation Package of Reforms Coalition, the “largest and most visible reform network” in the country, which has been funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and Global Affairs Canada.
Since 2019, when CYM co-founded the National Ukrainian Youth Association (NUMO), the executive director of this prominent umbrella organization of “patriotic” youth groups in Ukraine has been Olena Podobed-Frankivska, the manager of youth policy for the Reanimation Package of Reforms. She is affiliated with CYM and married the former head of its chapter in Kyiv. Pavlo Podobed, her husband, is a name that keeps coming up in my research.
Podobed, some may recall, is the (former?) official in the state-run Ukrainian Institute of National Memory that coordinated its controversial “virtual necropolis” project, and wrote the “National Pantheon” page on its website. (He has reportedly also “accused Jews of being the main perpetrators of Soviet crimes against Ukrainians in the 1920s and 1930s.”) In 2021, while the new director of the Institute of National Memory denounced a march to commemorate the Waffen-SS Galician Division, Podobed and a friend from CYM on the NUMO board of directors visited Orest Vaskul, a veteran of the Galician Division that led the OUN-B in Ukraine when CYM started to receive grants from the National Endowment for Democracy.
In October 2022, Volodymyr Zelensky decreed Myroslav Simchych, a 99-year-old veteran of the OUN-B’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a “Hero of Ukraine.” Led by Roman Shukhevych, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army massacred tens of thousands of Polish civilians in an ethnic cleansing campaign. According to Eduard Dolinsky, director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee in Kyiv, Simchych was a “mass murder of the Polish population in Western Ukraine.” In 1944, he ordered the destruction of a Polish village called Pysten, and in another village, Troitse, “his unit killed 80 Poles and houses burned.” The following month at the CYM World Congress, shortly before Simchych celebrated his 100th birthday and died, the Banderite veteran was declared an honorary member of the Ukrainian Youth Association. His two sons, after all, are former leaders of CYM in Ukraine.
United States
Hanover Township, New Jersey was an interesting choice to host both the 2016 and 2022 World Congress of CYM, which typically rotates to different countries. In that stretch of time, a Banderite feud erupted in the New York metropolitan area, which has devastated their regional summer camp. The flashpoint in 2019 included an anonymous complaint submitted to the New York State Attorney General’s office from an alleged whistleblower in New Jersey. Nevertheless, the OUN-B “Land Leadership of America” has retained control of the Ukrainian American Youth Association (UAYA, or “SUMA”), the US branch of CYM.
Walter Zaryckyj, aka “WAZ,” the current US “Land Leader,” who has accused me of bugging the US headquarters building of OUN-B in Manhattan, did not show up for the event, but he was another recipient of the prestigious CYM award that Maj. Gen. Viktor Yahun traveled from Ukraine to receive. The UAYA president, the daughter of the prior “Land Lander,” opened the 2022 World Congress, and the deputy chair of the presidium was occupied by the president of the Women’s Association for the Defense of Four Freedoms for Ukraine (WADFFU) — an OUN-B “facade structure” for Ukrainian American women. Another WADFFU leader joined the World Executive, and her brother became a member of its judicial body.
Many American blockheads in CYM consider Dr. Walter Zaryckyj to be a genius professor. One of his videotaped lectures from 1989 became the basis of my found footage documentary, “WAZ and the Magic Circle.” According to one source, by the end of 1989, two world-views crystallized in the leadership of OUN-B, which apparently mirrored the division in the predecessor of CYM in Ukraine.
Supposedly the first camp, which included the next OUN-B leader, Slava Stetsko, supported “the construction of a national democratic state” and the “evolutionary [nationalist] development” of Ukraine, disavowing armed struggle. Zaryckyj was allegedly an ideologue of the more radical faction, which subscribed to the slogans, “The nation above all!” and “Ukraine for Ukrainians!” They wanted “a strong nationalist state,” and to “achieve the goal at any cost, or lose everything!”
Today’s elder leaders of the OUN-B network in the United States were not just members of CYM growing up, but the more radical TUSM, or Ukrainian Student Association of Mykola Mikhnovsky, the namesake of which coined the ethno-nationalist slogan, “Ukraine for Ukrainians!” Although TUSM no longer exists, the US branch of CYM has continued its annual tradition of ideological winter camps to recruit Ukrainian American youth into OUN-B.
The UAYA allegedly claims to have 1,500 active members, but the real number is probably closer to 500, which would be abysmal for an organization with almost 20 chapters still on the books. Its festivals in Ellenville, New York used to attract thousands, and now less than a hundred. With such desperate conditions, the OUN-B leadership in Ukraine has directly supported the efforts of a far-right teenager to rejuvenate CYM and the broader Banderite network in Cleveland.
The “Roman Shukhevych branch” of CYM in Manhattan, which has a Saturday school and a bust of Shukhevych, is under the thumb of the OUN-B “Land Leadership of America” which is largely based in the New York area. An hour and a half upstate, the CYM camp in Ellenville, and its “Heroes’ Monument” including oversized busts of Bandera and Shukhevych, were once a point of pilgrimage for OUN-B members around the world. In recent years, the camp became especially run-down. Zaryckyj was recently photographed there with the head of the SUMA Federal Credit Union based in Yonkers, New York, which is affiliated with the “June 30, 1941 branch” of CYM. There used to be a Jewish camp next door in Ellenville, and disparaging the neighbors was common. In the coming weeks and months, I hope to be able to share some of the horror stories I’ve heard about this place.
A couple more places
"...second or third-generation Banderites..." do these people inter-marry, maybe have to marry their cousins? And they're even in Baraboo, Wisconsin? That's where "Circus World" is. It'd be funny were it not so treacherous...