With Special Thanks to Dr. T. P. Wilkinson
When it comes to fascism in Ukraine the west practices a selective blindness and a selective amnesia based on it’s level of support for Ukraine. Two years before the “Maidan Revolution” (fascist coup of 2014) the EU parliament had condemned the popularity of Svoboda. Svoboda had begun as a party of neo-nazis the SNPU the Social National Party of Ukraine (a play on National Socialism ie Nazism) that had rebranded itself in successful attempt to go mainstream. Yet during the Maidan the west would claim that the idea that neo-nazis played a prominent role was merely Russian propaganda despite the fact that Svoboda leaders played a very public role in the protests sharing the stage with American politicians like John McCain. The Maidan stage itself was decorated with a giant portrait of Ukrainian fascist Stepan Bandera. Ten years earlier the Orange Revolution had brought Yushchenko to power and he had eventually made Stepan Bandera an official Hero of Ukraine. The Azov Battalion an offshoot of the SNPU’s paramilitary wing Patriot of Ukraine recently had to cancel it’s European tour recruiting drive over fears of anti-fascist protests. A couple months earlier an Azov member had posted a selfie of himself touring Auschwitz in a T-shirt with an apocryphal Hitler quote. When I began this series in 2022 the Azov Battalion were being glorified as heroes by the mainstream media. A couple years before that they were under investigation by the media for training a global network of neo-nazis and for inspiring fascist mass shooters. Prior to that the west had attempted to whitewash their reputation and explain away their “romantic” fascination with Nazi symbolism as the New York Times termed it.
Prior to that the world gave little thought to Ukraine except briefly in 2004 during the “Orange Revolution.” Thus few know that these fascist paramilitaries which overthrew the Ukrainian Government in 2014 and then fought in the ensuing civil war could all trace their roots back to the early 1990’s. These groups thrived in the chaos and corruption of post soviet Ukraine fighting proxy wars with Russia and acting as hired thugs for Ukrainian oligarchs and intelligence agencies. Sadly their is an enormous gap in the literature on this topic the world is badly in need of a book covering the Ukrainian “far right” from 1992-2022. I use term “far right” since mainstream journalists hate to label anything in Ukraine “fascist.” Nonetheless I will attempt to tell the prehistory of the fascist groups that would later play such an important role in plunging their nation into a war with Russia. Actually if you read Andrew Wilson’s flawed but useful “Ukrainian Nationalism in the 1990’s: A Minority Faith” it quickly becomes apparent that in the minds of Ukraine’s fascists the war with Russia began the moment Ukraine gained it’s independence. Further they began to see their own government as a “Russian occupation” and much of the Ukrainian population as “Russian occupiers”. Ultimately however their path to success lay in somehow reconciling or merging their Western Ukrainian ethno-nationalism (which saw only Ukrainian speaking ethnic Ukrainians as truly Ukrainian) with central and eastern Ukrainian civic nationalism (which saw everyone living in Ukraine as Ukrainians regardless of language or ethnic origin.) The Azov movement is in this sense the crowing achievement of the OUN/B legacy Russian speaking eastern Ukrainians who are fanatically devoted to Ukrainian fascism. Many Ukraine observers thought this uneasy merger between OUN/B style ethnonationalism and post-soviet civic nationalism had been forever cemented by Russia’s 2022 invasion. The internet was full of anecdotes of former “pro-Russian” Ukrainians transforming overnight into hardcore Ukrainian nationalists. President Zelensky who had been elected by appealing to Russian speaking Ukrainians and running on a peace platform was now touring the world with his former enemies in the Azov Battalion having been elevated to the status of a postmodern Winston Churchill.
Still there are still some tense contradictions in Ukraine. Recently Svoboda politician Iryna Farion was assassinated by an Azov allied neo-Nazi for claiming that Russian speaking Azov members were all potential traitors. Farion who was based in Lviv in Western Ukraine (self proclaimed Bandera city) had become infamous for her insane russophobia and eforts to ban the Russian language, music and culture, providing an endless stream of shocking statements (but only In Ukraine and Russia as the western media avoided reporting her statements as it would damage Ukraine’s image) Ironically as I mentioned earlier Svoboda and Azov both grew out of the Social National Party of Ukraine although future Azov founder Andriy Biletsky had refused to go along with Svoboda’s attempt at becoming a respectable political party refusing to give up his openly neo-nazi stance. His Patriot of Ukraine paramilitary had set up it’s headquarters in Eastern Ukraine in Kharkov back in the 1990’s acting as hired muscle for Arseniy Avakov the future interior minister of Ukraine who would sponsor Azov’s rise to become the largest neo-nazi military formation in the world.
However before getting deeper into the history of fascism in post-soviet Ukraine I should set the events in their historical context. You should probably read the first four parts of this series as it is to complicated to summarize the history of the OUN at this point. Ukraine is in many ways the poster child for the messy nature of history. And specifically the fluid nature of endings. What became Ukraine was a battleground between North (Vikings and Slavs) vs South (steppe nomads and Muslim and Byzantine civilizations) and later East (Russia) vs West (The Polish- Lithuanian commonwealth and later Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire). Take World War 1 for example where the Russian empire managed to capture what would later become western Ukraine (Galicia which had been absorbed by the Austro-Hungarian empire when Poland ceased to exist having been carved up by Russia Germany and Austria) before being forced to make a long retreat eventually loosing Russian Ukraine to Germany. for the west it ended in November 1918 but in Ukraine it was the start of a new stage of the war two Ukrainian republics were declared the ZUNR the West Ukrainian People’s republic and the UNR which had existed briefly prior to the German occupation replaced it with a Hetmanate and Ukraine became embroiled in the The Polish Ukrainian war, Russian Civil War and The Polish-Soviet War. Across Eastern Europe and in Turkey wars continued long after the “Great War” had supposedly ended giving birth to new nations and leading to the founding of the Soviet Union.
The OUN would be born out of this period of interwar chaos in 1929 founded by Eugene Konovalets a veteran of World War 1 and the wars that followed. It would the enthusiastic youth of “the Bandera Generation” who had been too young to fight in the war that would make up the future OUN/B leaders. The older generation lived in exile and so a young Stepan Bandera would become head of the movement operating in what was then Eastern Poland and would become Western Ukraine when the Soviet Union annexed it at the start of World War 2 as part of the territories it gained through the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Bandera lead a terror campaign in Poland but was arrested and made famous by his trial. He was freed from a Polish prison when Germany invaded Poland and then Bandera tried to take control of the OUN. The OUN split into two parts the OUN/M and the OUN/B both allying themselves with the Nazis. They would feud bitterly accusing each other of being traitors and soviet dupes.
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 the two OUN branches followed. Bandera’s deputy Yaroslav Stetsko would declare an independent state in Lvov Ukraine on June 30, 1941 and unleash a wave of genocidal pogroms against Ukrainian jews. The Germans refused to recognize this new state and Bandera and Stetsko were put under arrest and forced to stay in Berlin. The OUN/B would still provide recruits to the auxiliary police and play a key role in the holocaust. Later they would create the UPA which carried out the massacre of 100,000 Poles in an effort to ethnically cleanse Ukraine. The OUN/M would help the Germans create the Waffen SS Galicia division. The Red Army would liberate Ukraine in 1944, and the war would supposedly end on May 9, 1945. However the UPA would continue to fight on for another 8 years although they had largely lost the war by 1950 and could only field a tiny force. Just as with with World War 1 World War 2 had lasted much longer in Ukraine.
By now the UPA were being backed by the CIA and MI6. It was now the Cold War or World War 3 as I prefer to call it due to the many bloody wars that took in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and even Europe. During the Cold War the OUN/B splintered again and was sponsored by various western intelligence agencies. During the Cold War Yaroslav Stetsko headed the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of nations and Ukrainian fascists were thus at the center of a vast network of former nazi collaborators. In 1959 Stepan Bandera was assassinated by the KGB and became the object of a martyr cult that continues to this day. Ukrainian fascists and their sympathizers were given posts in prestigious universities and were allowed to make their pro-OUN version of history the dominant one. In exile the OUN/B and OUN/M became an intergenerational movement using youth groups, summer camps, and Ukrainian cultural centers to indoctrinate their children and grand children. They had their own calendar of holidays to keep the faith alive celebrating yearly at the anniversary of Bandera’s birth and death the founding of the UPA, the June 30 1941, declaration of independence and other dates. A powerful and well organized fascist Ukrainian diaspora became embedded in the U.S. Canada, Australia, Germany and other countries which controlled a powerful Ukrainian lobby.
Meanwhile in Western Ukraine the former OUN-UPA supporters kept a low profile during most of the cold war but during Gorbachev’s Perestroika and Glasnost they began to resurface building statues and museums dedicated to Stepan Bandera and the OUN/B before the Soviet Union had even collapsed. They were encouraged with funding and advisers from the Ukrainian diaspora. The native Ukrainian fascists made alliances with both the so-called National democrats or Liberal nationalists and the National Communists. Post-Soviet Russia became infamous as the birthplace of the so called Red-Brown alliance as both Communists and fascists fought Yeltsin’s attempt to impose neo-liberal austerity by attacking his own parliament to the acclaim of the western press. Only now are people becoming aware of Ukraine as the birthplace of the Blue-Brown alliance of “liberals” and fascists. It began during the “Cold War” as Ukrainian dissidents allied with Ukrainian fascists in the prisons. The alliance would continue during the destruction of the USSR when fascists like Oles Tyahnybok (Future Svoboda founder) would join “moderate” dissident groups like Rukh (he was part of it’s Intelligence wing Varta Rukh). Rukh Leader Chornovil would attend the conference of KUN (The Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists) the OUN/B front founded by Yaroslav Stetsko’s widow Slava Stetsko in Ukraine. At the KUN Conference Chornovil would claim that there was no ideological difference between KUN and Rukh. At the second Rukh Congress in 1992 they vote to rehabilitate the OUN-UPA. This alliance would continue through the Orange Revolution of 2004 and the Maidan revolution of 2014. The dissidents would be replaced by western funded “democracy promotion” NGO’s. Now American liberals proudly sport Ukrainian flags on their twitter accounts completely oblivious to the fascist dark side of Ukrainian nationalism. Of course the Obama and Biden Administrations quite cynically knowingly used Ukrainian fascists as foot soldiers in their new cold war on Russia. The U.S. Republican party has also maintained a 7 decades long relationship with Ukrainian fascists as I discussed in part 4 of this series and as originally exposed in Russ Bellant’s classic book “the Old Nazis, and the New Right.” John McCain was in charge of the Republican branch of the NED during the Orange Revolution earlier he had been a key WACL member and later would appear on stage during Maidan with Svoboda founder Oleh Tyahnybok.
This time period covered in this article was the era of American hyper-power. Russia was basically an American puppet state under Yeltsin. With the advice of the Harvard boys Russia became a chaotic hell scape of poverty and crime an estimated 5-7 million people died as a result of the transition to capitalism in Russia and Ukraine. No one could stand up to the U.S. and seemingly few wanted to. Under the Clinton Administration it seemed to be the age of the Pax Americana. Yet this was only on the surface and was in fact a symptom of the complete taming of the corporate media that had begun under Reagan which I’ve discussed in my Iran/Contra series. Iraq was being economically strangled in the wake of Bush’s gulf war. Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright had remarked that 500,000 dead Iraqi children was a price worth paying to stop Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction program. Albright would head the NED’s Democratic branch during the Orange Revolution. In Colombia the Clinton administration launched a bloody dirty war under the cover of the war on drugs that would claim 250,000 lives. In Rwanda and the Congo the U.S. waged covert wars that claimed 7 million lives. It was a special brand of psychological warfare meant to lay the groundwork for later “Humanitarian Interventions” like the ones that destroyed Libya and nearly destroyed Syria. Behind the scenes the U.S. was pulling the strings while pretending to stand helplessly on the sidelines while the media demanded action.
Most relevant to Ukraine was the U.S.-NATO campaign to destroy Yugoslavia. The scheme had begun under Bush but accelerated under Clinton. In Croatia the U.S. backed pro-Ustashi elements. The Ustashi were Croatian fascists with close ties to the OUN famed for their brutality. Like the OUN the Ustashi had set up networks in exile. Eventually U.S. mercenary firms helped Croatia expel it’s entire Serbian minority. In Bosnia the U.S. recruited al Qaeda to fight on the side of the Pro Muslim Brotherhood government. In Kosovo the U.S. backed the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) who were al Qaeda allied heroin traffickers and organ thieves. Madeline Albright was rumored to be dating the KLA leader. Russia was backing the remnants of Yugoslavia controlled by the Serbs. It was Russia’s backing of Serbia that had sparked World War 1 back in 1914. The war on Yugoslavia nearly lead to a Russian war with NATO during one tense standoff between Russian and NATO forces at Pristina airport June 12, 1999. At the same time the U.S. was able to get Yeltsin to constantly rein in Milosevic who would rein in the Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia. The U.S. bombing of Kosovo in 1999 was a key factor in the the rise of Putin turning the Russian people against NATO and panicking the Russian security services. Other key factors behind sparking the new cold war were Russia’s ongoing proxy war with the U.S. in Chechnya, the US caused collapse of the Russian economy in 1998, and of course the frantic pace of NATO expansion.
Back in Serbia Milosevic was overthrown in an NED backed color revolution by the NGO Optor. It was the first color revolution to receive widespread media attention earlier there had been little remembered color revolutions in Bulgaria and Slovakia during the 1990’s. The first color revolution or “people powered coup” took place in the Philippines in 1986. Then the same techniques were used to destabilize the Warsaw pact and destroy the Soviet Union as I showed in part 4 of this series. It was Serbia that would provide the blueprint and even the advisers for Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003 and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004 as well as failed attempts at color revolutions in Belarus and Russia. Georgia’s Color Revolution would later lead it into starting a disastrous 8 day war with Russia in 2008 at the end of George. H.W. Bush’s Administration. Bush vetoed Vice President Cheney’s plan to launch a U.S. attack on Russian forces.
George W. Bush and the war on terror the illusion of peace was gone replaced by a global forever war on “Terror.” Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded. Covert wars were waged in Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, the Philippines and other little remembered places. Ukraine’s President Kuchma earned the Bush Administrations wrath by selling an advanced radar system to Iraq just before the U.S. invasion. Putin’s Russia battling U.S. backed al Qaeda in Chechnya hoped to improve relations by having his allies in the former soviet states of Central Asia let the U.S. set up logistics bases for the war on Afghanistan. Putin and Bush had bonded over shared christianity and Putin had a strange fascination with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice who was a talented concert pianist. Relations soured over NATO expansion and Putin’s role in convincing France and Germany to oppose the Iraq war.
While world attention was focused on “the war on Terror” the second Cold war was continuing. It was waged with color revolutions and fought over pipeline politics and NATO expansion. By 2008 Putin would give his infamous Munich speech condemning the American empire while George W. Bush was demanding Ukraine be admitted to NATO. The new Cold War would explode under Obama in the wake of the 2014 Maidan coup (actually the anti-Russian propaganda kicked into high gear during the Sochi olympics). Today tensions with Russia and China have completely eclipsed the war on terror which was officially ended a few months before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. In reality after 100 years of the cold war (it really began in 1917) the mentality was so thoroughly ingrained in both US/NATO leaders and the Russian security services that one could argue that the cold war never ended. Ukraine was fated to yet again become the battleground between east and west.
Now to return to 1992 and newly “independent” Ukraine. I put it into quotations because in reality Ukraine owes it’s statehood almost entirely to it’s time as a Soviet republic. On March 28-29 of 1992 KUN held it’s inaugural congress. KUN stands for the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists it was set up as an OUN/B front by Slava Stetsko widow of OUN/B leader and would be Prime Minister of Ukraine Yaroslav Stetsko. After Yaroslav Stetsko’s death in 1986 Slava had succeeded him as head of the OUN/B. After Ukraine gained it’s independence the OUN/B relocated from Munich to Kiev and created the front group KUN. KUN would attempt to unite the other Ukrainian fascist groups under it’s control but would never succeed. Ironically although all the Ukrainian fascist groups drew inspiration from the OUN/B they refused to obey the returned OUN/B exiles because they were considered too cautious and too moderate. KUN remained influential however. For example it’s armed wing was called Stepan Bandera’s Trident it would be later headed by Right Sector founder Dmytro Yarosh who played a key role in the Maidan coup and was appointed an adviser to Ukraine’s then top general Zaluzhny. KUN would also spearhead the creation of the TsDVR (The Institute for the Study of the Liberation Movement) which glorifies Stepan Bandera and whitewashes the history of the OUN/B. Volodymyr Viatrovich headed the TsDVR before becoming Ukraine’s “Memory Czar” as head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory he whitewashed the history of the OUN-UPA claiming they saved Jews instead of massacring them and later writing Ukraine’s Decommunization laws that made it illegal to criticize the OUN-UPA or to praise the Soviet Union. Both Yarosh and Viatrovich have close ties to the former head of the Ukrainian SBU Nalyvaichenko who is Godfather to Yarosh’s children and who gave Viatrovich control of the SBU archive to falsify history. Slava Stetsko became a Rada member known as “Mother of the House” as she was it’s oldest female member until her death in 2003.
The global head of the OUN/B from 2000-2009 was Andriy Haydamach the first second generation OUN/B leader born in the diaspora in Belgium he relocated to Munich, Germany where he wrote for the OUN/B press and worked for Radio Svoboda the Ukrainian language version of the CIA created RFE/RL (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) during the 1980’s. In 1992 he opened Radio Svoboda’s Kiev headquarters and ran Radio Svoboda till 2000 when he became the new head of the OUN/B. In 2009 the new head of the OUN/B became Ukrainian/Australian Stefan Romaniw who maintained close ties with Australia’s leaders and would head the OUN/B until 2022. Romaniw recently died in June 2024 was lionized in the Australian press and given a state funeral. Romaniw was replaced by his former deputy Oleh Medunytsia in 2022. Medunytsia had participated in “The Granite Revolution” I discussed in part 4 and went on to be elected to the Ukrainian Rada from 2012-2019 and is the first OUN/B leader born in Soviet Ukraine and the first from the Sumy region rather then Western Ukraine. Slava Stetsko’s fellow KUN founding member Roman Zvarych a Ukrainian American 2nd generation OUN-B member from New York would be appointed Justice minister by President Yushchenko before being forced to resign because he lied about his academic qualifications. Zvarych would play a key role in founding the Azov Battalion but would later feud with them.
March 1992 the same month KUN was formed a Ukrainian fascist group UNA-UNSO launched an invasion of Crimea that was so provocative Crimea was on the verge of breaking away from Ukraine. At the time Ukraine and Russia were in a political conflict over the status of the Black Sea Fleet which Russia ended up retaining control over. UNA-UNSO sent 900 members to Crimea claiming they wanted to hold a memorial for 120 Ukrainian sailors who were drowned by Soviet Forces after raising the Ukrainian flag in defiance back in 1918. Given the Ukrainian nationalists penchant for falsifying history the incident may or may not have occurred back in 1918. In any case the 900 UNA-UNSO members descended on Sevastopol the most pro-Russian city in the most pro-Russian part of Ukraine, Crimea and were refused entry by the local authorities. The UNA-UNSO then blocked the train lines into the city. The local authorities were forced to allow UNA-UNSO into the city where they went on a rampage tearing down Russian flags and putting up Ukrainian ones and plastering the city with signs saying “Crimea is Ukrainian” and “the Black Sea Fleet is Ukrainian.” The locals who were often Soviet navy veterans were so annoyed that 2 months later in May 1992 Crimea’s Rada voted for conditional independence although they canceled the referendum that would have confirmed this under pressure from the Ukrainian government eventually they would have to settle for Autonomous status. UNA-UNSO’s response to the declaration of Crimean independence was “Crimea will be Ukrainian or it will be depopulated.”
The UNA-UNSO were the Ukrainian National Assembly founded as UMPA (Ukrainian Interparty-Assembly) back in July 1990. It had sought to recreate the short lived post World War 1 era UNR (Ukrainian Peoples Republic) by convincing Ukrainians to register as citizens of the UNR which would replace the Soviet Ukrainian Government. However after Ukraine became Independent UMPA rebranded as UNA (Ukrainian National Assembly) September 91 and shifted their strategy to a failed attempt to get the 500,000 signatures needed to get their leader Yuri Shukhevych (son of UPA leader Roman Shukhevych and former political prisoner) registered as a candidate in Ukraine’s first Presidential election. The UNA armed wing UNSO the (Ukrainian Self Defense Forces) formed September 1991 to resist a possible Soviet crackdown via gladio style sabotage and terror. In Ukrainian their initials could also refer to a sports association sports clubs are popular cover for fascist paramilitary training in Ukraine (and elsewhere). Ukrainian military veterans trained UNSO. By the mid 1990’s their were 5,000 armed and trained members of UNSO and the UNA had 14,000 members.
The month after their Crimean adventure UNA-UNSO went to fight in the Transnistria a breakaway region of Moldova. In addition to a book on the Ukrainian far right the world is also in need of a good book on all the wars that erupted after the destruction of the Soviet Union which western think tankers refer to as the “Wars of Soviet Succession” of which the Russo-Ukrainian war is merely the latest chapter in their view. In any case Transistria is a confusing chapter in UNA-UNSO history as they were seemingly fighting on the same side as the Russian backed separatists. There were persistent allegations that in addition to being supported by elements of the Ukrainian government the Russian ministry of the Interior was also backing them although after Transnistria UNA-UNSO always fought against Russia and it’s proxies in it’s various proxy wars. A mystery of the chaotic Yeltsin years where the security services were loyal to various treacherous oligarchs and even to foreign intelligence agencies like the CIA. UNA-UNSO claimed that they were in Transnistria to fight both Moldova and “Russian influence” in reality they saw it as a great opportunity to buy or seize weapons stockpiles and smuggle them back into Ukraine.
In June 1992 UNSO entered Ukraine’s sectarian religious conflict which began during the Russian civil war and continues to this day. To simplify the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is split between factions that recognize the authority of the Moscow Patriarch and those loyal to Kiev’s Metropolitan. UNSO provided bodyguards to Metropolitan Filoret after he seceded from the Russian Orthodox Church and joined the Ukrainian Autochephalous Orthodox Church. UNA-UNSO also harassed Filoret’s rival Metropolitan Vladimir who had been sent from Moscow. 30 years later this sectarian conflict continues with Ukraine’s government arresting churchmen who recognize Moscow and trying to seize their churches. It’s a hot button issue in Russia and Ukraine but is largely ignored in the rest of the world. The Ukrainian Rada recently voted to outlaw the Ukrainian Orthodox Church that’s loyal to the Moscow Patriarch.
The next year in July 1993 UNA-UNSO went to Georgia to fight against the Abkhazian separatists. Georgia’s first President Zviad Gamskhurdia had been a mad nationalist poet who plunged his country into civil war by launching massacres of ethnic minorities who formed separatist republics in self defense. Back in the 1970’s and 1980’s Gamskhurdia had been lauded in the west as a dissident. Russia backed Abkhazia because it wanted to gain control of it’s valuable seaside territory. Strangely future infamous Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev and his forces also fought on the side of Abkhazia although they also looted it’s capital city. Russia also backed the Pro-Russian South Ossetians who were once among the most loyal Soviet citizens (they had the highest per capita death toll during World War 2) and were closely tied to the North Ossetians who live on the Russian side of the border. Russia also backed a strongman in separatist Adjara. Russia used the separatist republics as leverage against Georgia. After plunging his country into chaos and massacring opposition protestors Gamskhurdia was toppled in a coup and the coup plotters invited Eduard Shevardnadze back as the new President. However the coup plotters who invited him back were just as committed to wiping out the South Ossettians and the Abkhazians as Gamskhurdia had been. The war would continue until the end of 1993 when Georgia and Russia negotiated a ceasefire. Shevardnadze had to make peace in order for Georgia to be admitted to the UN.
Shevardnaze was a favorite of the Americans having resigned as Foreign minister of the Soviet Union because he didn’t think Gorbachev was democratizing fast enough. Ironically Shevardnadze would be ousted by a U.S. backed Color Revolution in (the Rose revolution) in 2003. It was lead by the western educated Mikheil Saakashvili who Shevardnadze had brought into the government years before. The Georgian NGO Kmara that was the guiding force behind the Rose Revolution had been trained by Serbia’s Optor. Both Optor and Kmara would head to Ukraine to train the activists from Pora that would lead the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. All this was of course funded by the NED and various George Soros foundations. In November 2007 a giant statue of Prometheus was unveiled in Tblisi Georgia it was to honor the Promethean League the Polish backed fascist umbrella group uniting Ukrainians, Pan-turkists and other non-Russian minorities in the Soviet Union.The scheme had been revived and the Presidents of Poland, Lithuania and, Georgia attended the unveiling. Yushchenko was there in spirit as the Promethean League had been absorbed by the OUN/B controlled ABN back in the 1940’s.
The new Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili after being armed to the teeth by NATO decided to launch a surprise attack on South Ossetia in 2008 which killed Russian peace keepers and civilians leading to the August 2008 8 day war in Georgia when Russia invaded in response. Saakashvili was eventually voted out of office in November 2013 after a series of scandals. Over in Ukraine Saakashvili friend President Yushchenko backed Saakashvili to the hilt and threatened to expel Russia’s black sea fleet from Ukraine. After the Maidan coup and the Odessa Massacre Saakashvili would be appointed Governor of the Odessa region in Ukraine by Petro Poroshenko. Saakashvili is serving time in a Georgian prison for murder and a failed coup plot. Georgia survived a failed color revolution this year after passing a law regulating foreign funded NGOs. Another gratuitous tangent but the histories of Georgia and Ukraine are closely intertwined both had color revolutions, battled Russian backed separatists and provoked Russian invasions, Putin warned that if either joined NATO it would be a red line back in 2008. The same year NATO would promise eventual membership to both.
However lets return to the early 1990’s and UNA-UNSO which fought on Georgia’s side in the Abkhazia in starting in April of 1993. By August of 1993 4 UNSO members had died, 20 were wounded and 10 received medals from Georgian President Shevardnadze. From fall 1994-1995 the UNA-UNSO members joined the first Chechen war fighting on the side of Chechen separatists in the Shamil Basayev faction (who masterminded horrifying terror attacks that killed hundreds of Russians) allied Ibn al- Khattab (Saudi terrorist). At one point Oleksandr Muzychko aka Sashko Byli supposedly headed Chechen President Dudaev’s bodyguards. UNA-UNSO and Muzychko in particular became infamous for their brutal torture of Russian POW’s in Chechnya. Muzychko, broke fingers, gouged out eyes, and pulled fingernails and teeth out with pliars before slitting his victims throats or shooting them. For his efforts he was awarded National Hero status in Chechnya. After the Maidan coup Muzychko ran a protection racket demanding bribes from local businessmen he bullied the wrong person and was shot and killed by police March 2014. According to the Russian Government a number of infamous Ukrainian fascists would fight in Chechnya including Dmytro Yarosh and Oleh Tyanhybok. UNA-UNSO would fade into a veterans organization by the time of the 2014 coup but it was merged into Right Sector providing a valuable organizational and fund raising network. By this time over 70 of it’s members had died in various proxy wars and hundreds more ended up in prison. In 2002 UNA-UNSO leader Andriy Shkyl joined the Yulia Timoshenko bloc (BYuTy) and was elected to the Ukrainian rada. UNA were also quick to revive the OUN-B’s traditional international connections to other fascists at the end of 1993 they held a congress in Kiev to which they invited far right groups from across Europe. Ukrainian fascists were soon allied to Le Pen in France the National Front in Britain, Jobbik in Hungary and other far right groups in Poland, Serbia, Belarus, Croatia, the Czech republic etc. Even Russian fascists like Zhironovsky and Dugin dropped by Ukraine to network with far right groups. American Klansman/Neo-Nazi David Duke was given an honorary degree by MAUP a Ukrainian management school with fascist leanings. Yushchenko was on the MAUP board for several years.
Another group that would join Right Sector was Stepan Bandera’s Trident which had begun as the military wing of KUN. It was lead by Dmytro Yarosh who would later head right sector. Another fascist paramilitary group it was organized into units called “hundreds”. A structure that would be adopted by the Maidan protestors. It trained it’s members using Vyshkols which were a sort of war game disguised as a sports/camping/ team building excercise where members were indoctrinated in Ukrainian fascist ideology. Future SBU head Nalyvaichenko who was Godfather to Yarosh’s children took part in Trident training camps while he was a Rada member. Another prominent Trident member was notorious OUN-B apologist Serhii Kvit rector at the prestigious Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Hopefully I’ll discuss Yarosh and Stepan Bandera’s Trident at greater length in Part 6. The other groups that would be merged together to form Right Sector in 2013 were the SNA (Social National Assembly) and White Hammer. The SNA was a a revived version of an earlier group that became the political wing of Patriot of Ukraine the group headed by Azov Battalion’s future founder Andriy Biletsky (although he was in prison for hate crimes at the time of Right Sectors creation). Biletsky had revived the SNA to replace his former political wing SNPU which had rebranded itself Svoboda. Both used the words “Social Nationalist” to thinly veil their nazism. The White Hammer were a small group of Neo-Nazis organized around a “white power” rock band.
Svoboda would become the most successful Ukrainian fascist group prior to the Azov Movement. In 2012 it would receive 10% of the vote in the Ukrainian Rada election provoking a brief international uproar. Svoboda began as the SNPU the Social National Party of Ukraine founded by Yaroslav Andrushkiv, Andriy Parubiy and Oleh Tyahnybok in Lviv 1991. Originally it was created to provide muscle for Valentyn Moroz’s Nationalist Bloc. Moroz was an openly fascist Ukrainian dissident who was deported by the Soviets, allied with and feuded with the OUN/B diaspora in the west and then returned to Ukraine after independence. The SNPU adopted the Nazi wolfsangel as their symbol. They claimed it was merely the Cyrilic letters for I and N standing for the “Idea of the Nation” but their logo was nearly identical to that used by the Nazi SS and the U.S. Aryan Nations. SNPU recruited an army of neo-nazi skinheads from the Ukrainian football hooligan scene. They wore black pants, steel grey shirts, had fascist haircuts and held torchlit marches waving their wolfsangel banners. They were openly white supremacist complaining when a half congolese singer represented Ukraine in the Eurovision contest among other racist incidents.
In 2004 (one source claims 2002) the SNPU decided to rebrand itself in an effort to enter the political mainstream. It renamed itself Svoboda “Freedom” naming itself after the far right Austrian Freedom Party lead by Jorg Haider. Svoboda would attempt to thinly veil it’s fascism. Andriy Parubiy quit the party in disgust. Svoboda’s rebrand was successful enough to vastly increase it’s popularity in Ukraine but one didn’t need to dig very deeply to discover that they remained full blown fascists. In 2004 Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok joined Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine Party a couple of months later he gave a speech at an old UPA training camp in the mountains of Ivano-Frankivsk where he praised the UPA for killing “Moskals (Racist term for Russians) Jews, (he used a racist Ukrainian words similar to “Yids” Germans, and other Scum” and claimed the Ukraine was run by a “Muscovite-Jewish Mafia.” Yushchenko was forced to expel Tyanhybok from “Our Ukraine.” in embarrassment.
Svoboda’s chief ideologist Yuri Mykhal’chysyn claims “We consider tolerance a crime.” Mykhal’chysyn wrote his PHD on the rise of the German Nazi party, founded the Joseph Goebbels Political Research Institute in 2005, (since renamed after Ernst Junger) posts online as Nachtigal88 (refering to the Nazhtigal battalion of Ukrainian collaborators who invaded with the Germans and participated in the Lvov Pogrom while 88 is common neo-nazi code for “Heil Hitler” H being the 8th letter) , and is Svoboda’s liason to neo-nazi skinheads. Mykhal’chysn called the Holocaust “a bright episode in European Civilization”. Svoboda allied skinheads have a network of sports clubs, martial arts schools, and football tournaments it uses to recruit members. Another fascist paramilitary C14 also known as Sich grew out of a Svoboda’s youth group. It’s name is a reference to the infamous “14 words” of the infamous American neo-nazi David Lane “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Lane was the leader of The Order which carried out a string of bank robberies and assassinated a Denver talk show host. C14 is used by the SBU to carry out it’s dirty work and was based out of the Canadian Embassy during Maidan. Svoboda thus gave birth to Patriot of Ukraine (which gave birth to Azov) and to C14. Svoboda is the group the head of the GOP’s NED faction Senator John McCain decided to partner with in 2012 and appeared on stage with in 2014. Four Svoboda party members would receive Cabinet posts after the 2014 coup.
Now having cataloged the various fascist groups in Ukraine it’s time to discuss Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution. Both President Leonid Kravchuk and the Nationalists believed that breaking up to the Soviet Union would make Ukraine prosperous. They forgot how interconnected the Soviet economy was and predictably Ukraine was plunged into poverty it’s GNP fell by 43% and inflation skyrocketed. Further the Ukrainian economy was dependent on cheap gas from Russia. The west thought Kravchuk wasn’t “reforming” Ukraine’s economy fast enough and so they backed Leonid Kuchma in the 1994 elections. Ironically Kuchma got elected by appealing to the Russian speaking eastern Ukraine alienated by Kravchuk’s nationalist policies. Once in power Kuchma the master manipulator played a delicate balancing act between the different regions of Ukraine and between Russia and the west. Internationally he pursued a “Multivectoral foreign policy” ie he played both sides against each other. Ukraine supplied troops for the NATO wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. At the same time Ukraine sold weapons to Iraq, North Korea, China, and Iran. Domestically he allowed both western and eastern Ukraine to take their own trajectories his concern was making money and he was happy the west Ukrainians were focused on issues like language and whitewashing the history of the OUN-UPA. Since he had no positive platform it proved useful to him at election time to use the West Ukrainian fascists to scare the east into voting for him.
Kuchma was from Dnipro as it’s been renamed and I’ll call it for Dnipro convenience (It’s was until recently called Dnipropetrovsk named for the communist Grigori Petrovsky renamed against the will of it’s citizens as part of Ukraine’s post Maidan war on everything Russian or Soviet, but easier to spell or type) Dnipro is a strange city. In Soviet times it was a “secret city” because of it’s role in producing Soviet ICBMs. Kuchma was the former manager at the Soviet missile factory Yuzhmash in Dnipro prior to becoming President. In Soviet times Dnipro was home to a powerful political clique as Soviet leader Brezhnev and other high ranking soviet officials were from there. According to Peter Korotaev the divisions in Ukraine are in part the story of Dnipro vs Donetsk. Dnipro became the center of financial schemes while Donetsk remained a manufacturing hub dependent on the Russian market. Donetsk was also infamous for it’s organized crime Yanukovych who was from Donetsk was an ex-con who’d been convicted of robbery and assault in 1967 and 1970 respectively and sent to prison twice in his youth. He gained the patronage of a famous cosmonaut and possibly of the KGB and become a successful manager in the transport sector and then a politician. He was selected by Ukraine’s then richest oligarch Rinat Akhmetov to become Governor of Donetsk, and eventually Prime Minister and Kuchma’s chosen successor. In Dnipro a younger generation of Oligarchs turned on Kuchma and formed alliances with the Ukrainian Nationalists in western Ukraine. The most famous examples of Dnipro oligarchs who joined the opposition were Yulia Tymoshenko and Igor Kolmoisky. Kolmoisky is infamous for his corrupt Privat Bank his ties to Biden and Trump his TV network broadcast Zelensky’s TV show “Servant of the People” where Zelensky played an ordinary man who becomes President of Ukraine. Zelensky then ran for President and won. Earlier Kolmoisky’s TV channels would play a key role in backing the Orange Revolution and Kolmoisky would sponsor the future members of Right Sector who were his private thugs in corporate raids. Zelensky would later turn on his former mentor refusing to return his bank.
Yulia Tymoshenko managed via her father in law Hennadi Tymoshenko’s communist party connections to make a fortune. She began her business by bootlegging videotapes of Western movies and somehow managed to shift into the energy sector thanks to high level patrons like Prime Minister Yevhen Marchuk and Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko. Charming a Gazprom executive Rem Viakhrov in her mini-skirt and doling out bribes to Russian officials she managed to get her company UESU (United Energy Systems of Ukraine) a monopoly on the supply of Russian gas to Ukraine. The company was making $10 Billion dollars a year and only paying $10,000 a year in taxes. She became known as “The Gas Princess” She personally made a billion dollars but then her ally in the Kuchma administration Lazarenko fell from grace and Ihor Balkai’s company Oil and Gas of Ukraine got the contract to supply Russian Gas. She decided to go into politics. Initially she joined her friend Oleksandr Turchynov’s Hromada party which she expanded to 300,000 members. Hromada became the party of dissidents. In 1999 she made a deal with Kuchma to leave Hromada and form her own party called the Fatherland Party. A number of Ukrainian fascists would join Fatherland over the years. Yulia also created the Yulia Tymoshenko bloc, her party acronym playfully referenced the english word Beauty BYuTy (Bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko) She managed to buy popularity by personally subsidizing increased social spending. Her party was a big success. She reinvented herself as a Ukrainian nationalist and dedicated herself to overthrowing Kuchma. Meanwhile Kuchma, Putin and even the U.S. opened investigations into her corrupt business practices. Yulia Tymoshenko’s co-conspirator Pavlo Lazarenko was convicted in the U.S. but even though she was codefendant she mysteriously was immune to charges. She’d be useful later. In Kuchma’s Ukraine one was allowed to steal as long as one remained loyal. Kuchma political opponents were investigated for corruption and since everyone was corrupt everyone was vulnerable. Despite their tense relations Kuchma appointed Tymoshenko deputy Prime Minister for fuel and energy.
By 2000 the U.S. and Western Europe had turned against Kuchma. So had elements of his own intelligence agency the SBU. The final straw or at least the excuse became the murder of the journalist Georgiy Gongadze (an ethnic Georgian) who had begun a series of articles exposing Kuchma’s corrupt cronies. Gongadze was funded by the NED and had been given a number of awards in the west. Gongadze disappeared mysteriously. It turned out he had been kidnapped and murdered. Kuchma’s bodyguard defected and released a tape in which Kuchma can be heard calling for Gongadze’s death. Kuchma’s bodyguard had secretly recorded a year of embarrassing conversations as privately Kuchma sounded more like a mafia don then a President. The actual hit was carried out by Ukrainian mobsters. Liberal NGO’s joined forces with Ukrainian fascists, and Yulia Tymoshenko in a failed attempt to topple Kuchma. These were known as the BTK protests. The same networks would be activated in 2004 before the Orange Revolution under a new name Pora and this time they would be advised by Serbia’s Optor and Georgia’s Kmara.
Now I’ll jump briefly to the U.S. and the OUN/B network there. Two key Ukrainian american OUN/B leaders since the 1980’s have been Askold Lozynskyj (Presient Ukrainian World Congress 1998-2008 and President of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America 1992-2000) and Walter Zarekyj (Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation). In September, 2000 Walter Zaryckyj created CUSUR (the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations) of which he is still the executive director. CUSUR organizes conferences for American politicians, diplomats and generals to shape America’s Ukraine policy. The first CUSUR conference included heavy hitters like Zbigniew Brzezinsky, Paul Wolfowitz, Mitch McConnel, and Michael McFaul. Other participants have included Atlantic Council members General Ben Hodges, General Wesley Clarke (who nearly started a war with Russia at Pristina airport back in 1999) and General Philip Breedlove. The Ukrainian- American moderators on these panels are usually OUN/B members like Zaryckyj who bragged that “80% of Congress people of both parties are saints who will do what we ask” to paraphrase what he was recorded saying in a recent Moss Robeson documentary. Another important Ukrainian American from the Diaspora was retired U.S. General Nicholas Krawciw. He was the son of a Waffen SS Galicia veteran and was sent to Ukraine to retrain Ukraine’s army along “democratic” lines. He is partially credited with the success of the Orange Revolution as the military never cracked down on the protestors. In Ukraine itself an important group reshaping the military was the Union of Officers of Ukraine which was a lobby group influential in getting the military to adopt Ukrainian nationalist ideology and insuring that fascists got promoted and opponents of nationalism were purged.
Another Ukrainian American would play an even greater role in shaping the future of Ukraine. This was Kateryna Chumachenko who was born to Ukrainian emigres in Chicago 1961 and would go on to marry Ukraine’s future President Viktor Yushchenko in 1998. Prior to that Kateryna Chumachenko was an active member of the OUN/B controlled Ukrainian lobby (The UCCA) and worked for the OUN/B propaganda arm the Ukrainian Information Service. She was active at World Anti-Communist League and Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations conferences. She was active in the “Captive Nations” movement. These are only her OUN/B related credentials she was also a graduate of the University of Chicago (A hotbed of Neo-conservatives and neo-liberal economics) who went on to work for the Treasury Department, State Department and the Reagan White House. At one point she was in charge of compiling lists of dissidents being held as political prisoners in the USSR. Gorbachev complained to Reagan at one point in reference to her work “Too many lists!” In 1988 she became the Reagan Administrations ethnic affairs liaison. She was part of the CIA front “Friends of Afghanistan” run by Zalmay Khallizad. She wrote an editorial for the Washington Times that was so Russophobic it’s been scrubbed from the web. She was on the board of a Neo-con think tank The American Enterprise Institute’s New Atlantic Initiative with Polish defense minister Radek Sikorksi who’s married to professional Russia hater Anne Applebaum and is close to Richard Perle. Sikorski would later design the EU’S Eastern Partnership Program to be a backdoor to NATO membership a key factor in provoking the 2014 war. Kateryna Chumachenko created her own think tank the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation which remains influential and funded some of the NGO’s involved in the Orange Revolution that brought her husband to power. It was while speaking to the U.S. Ukraine foundation that Victoria Nuland would brag about spending 5 Billion dollars to shape Ukraine’s democracy in the wake of the 2014 coup. After moving to Ukraine Chumachenko formed an informal alliance with 3 journalists from the Ukrainian diaspora Marta Kolomiets the first western journalist to move to Kiev after independence, Mary Miso of the Los Angeles Times and Chrystia Freeland (Grand daughter of a Nazi collabaror) then working for the Financial Times who is currently Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister. They formed an informal think tank which Kolomiets lead and which promoted Yushchenko.
In 1993 Kateryna Chumachenko moved to Kiev working for KPMG consulting. There she met and later married Viktor Yushchenko a central banker she helped advise as part of her consulting work. She went to work for the Barents group who hired political consultants for Yushchenko. The year after they married in 1999 Vice President Al Gore convinced Kuchma to make Yushchenko the Prime Minister. Yushchenko had been born in the Sumy region of Ukraine. His Patron Vadym Hetman was the head of Ukraine’s Agrombank. Yushchenko became his deputy. In 1991 Hetman became head of the National Bank of Ukraine and in 1993 Yushchenko replaced him as it’s head. 3 years of hyperinflation followed devastating the Ukrainian economy. Yushchenko’s bank was also mired in a number of corruption scandals. In 1998 Yushchenko’s patron Hetman was assassinated. Despite this Yushchenko somehow maintained a clean reputation at least compared to Kuchma and Tymoshenko and was thus selected by the NED to be the lead opposition candidate in the 2004 election. The more colorful and fiery Yulia Tymoshenko was promised the Prime Minister’s spot in exchange for backing Yushchenko.
Before covering the events of the “Orange Revolution” first lets review the machinery behind such color revolutions the funders of the various local NGO’s that are mobilized to overthrow the various foreign governments. USAID the notorious CIA front created back in the 1960’s continues to be a major funder for various “democracy promotion” NGO’s and played a major role during the Orange Revolution. The USAID role is usually overshadowed these days by the NED the National Endowment for Democracy created during the Reagan Administration. The job of the NED is to do openly what the CIA used to do secretly ie funnel money to politicians, manipulate the media, or discredit the election results. The NED has been immune to controversy in the U.S. domestically because of it’s innocuous sounding name and more importantly it’s structure which involves both political parties organized labor and corporate interests. The Democratic party branch is the NDI (National Democratic Institute.) The Republican Party branch is IRI (International Republican Institute). In February 2003 the IRI invited Yushchenko to Washington DC where he met with IRI head John McCain, Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Zbigniew Brzezinski. The U.S. Labor movement controls the Solidarity center. The corporate interests are represented by CIPE (The Center for International Private Enterprise.) Another key CIA linked front involved in numerous color revolutions is Freedom House which at the time of the Orange Revolution was run by former CIA director James Woolsey. The CIA linked think tank the Jamestown Foundation is another key player in Eastern Europe. Then of course there is the CIA itself which has so far managed to obscure it’s role in various color revolutions but while the NED is funding protestors the CIA is hard at work buying off politicians, the military and the Security Services convincing them to switch sides. Under Kuchma the CIA had developed close ties with Ukraine’s SBU which was intent on destabilizing Kuchma and preventing a Yanukovych Presidency. Then of course there is the State Department which also plays a crucial role. During the Orange Revolution Canada’s Ambassador Andrew Robinson organized an informal group of two dozen foreign ambassadors to coordinate support for the Orange Revolution. Canada is of course the nation with the strongest Ukraine lobby and in fact the OUN/B front UCC the Ukrainian Canadian Congress sent over 400 election monitors to Ukraine. Canada’s version of NED funded many Ukrainian NGO’s. Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the German Marshall fund were also heavily involved in funding Ukrainian NGO’s and has close ties to the Ukraine Lobby. Finally of course there is George Soros who has been meddling in eastern Europe and funding color revolutions, NGO’s and Soviet dissidents since the late 1980’s plays a key role through his Open Society Foundation. The Ukrainian branch of the Soros Foundation is the International Renaissance foundation. After a successful color revolutions Soros’ employees are granted key posts in the new government. Soros even pays the salaries of government officials supposedly in the name of fighting “corruption” but which is clearly corrupt in and of itself.
During the Orange Revolution another key role was played by veterans of Serbia’s color revolution Optor, and veterans of Georgia’s Rose Revolution Khmara. They had first hand experience that they could use to train Ukrainian activists in overturning the election results. These training camps were paid for by the NED, USAID etc recruits were given Gene Sharp’s manuals on how to overthrow a government and shown the american PBS documentary “Bringing Down a Dictator” on how Optor toppled Milosevic in Serbia. Their goal was to energize and unite the activists. The main Ukrainian NGO involved in the Orange Revolution was called Pora. Marko Markovic one of the Optor vets was fluent in Ukrainian and opened a media NGO Znayu “I know” which shared offices with it’s funder the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation (founded by future first lady Kateryna Yushchenko). In November 2004 another Optor veteran Marko Markovic was barred from entering Ukraine and received a 996 year travel ban. However it was far to late as Markovic had already visited Ukraine 22 times training Pora activists. There were two branches of Pora “Black” Pora which concentrated on attacking Kuchma and Yanukovych while pretending not to support any candidate based in West Ukraine and Yellow Pora which openly backed Yushchenko and was based in Kiev. Pora engaged in a viral marketing campaign weaponizing gen x hipster aesthetics to topple the government and making effective use of the internet. Pora pretended not to receive foreign funding but it’s leaders were also on various foreign funded election monitoring NGO’s boards. Various Ukrainian Oligarchs let them use print their materials for free, provided free transport and all sorts of other perks. Pora was also funded by Yulia Tymoshenko, Petro Poroshenko and Yushchenko’s money man David Zhvania who was a cousin of Zurab Zhvania a leader in Georgia’s Rose Revolution.
In addition to training an army of protestors (Pora) the U.S.’s second main goal was to train an army of election monitors, lawyers, judges, and journalists. Shaping various nations legal systems is an often overlooked part of the NED’s work as it is less dramatic but perhaps even more important then toppling governments. In Ukraine USAID funded DAI (Development Associates Incorporated) as part of their SEAUP (Strengthening Electoral Administration in Ukraine Program.) DAI’s job was to monitor elections and craft legislation and worked closely with the NED, Freedom House and other NGO’s. DAI bragged in 2005 “SEAUP administered by DAI played a decidedly important role role in Ukraine’s turn to democracy in 2004” Paraphrasing Hahn who quotes the DAI report This was no Idle boast as part of the SEAUP program huge numbers of people were trained including 7,405 election commissioners 95,000 polling station commissioners, 1,350 election judges, with over a hundred thousand people being trained in September and October 2004. These election monitors would later provide the backbone of the Orange Revolution protests. Under another program run by the U.S. Bar Association 3 of the Supreme court justices who decided to overturn the election results had also been trained. The U.S. and Canada also funded the exit polling NGO’s that would discredit the election results. Their exit polls were often skewed in Yushchenko’s favor. Both sides engaged in election fraud during the 2004 presidential elections in Ukraine but the U.S. sponsored election monitors only targeted Yanukovych. Russia sent their own “Political Technologists” and spin doctors to Ukraine but they were outclassed. Internews was a USAID funded NGO created in California in 1982 that trained over 2,000 Ukrainian journalists over the next decades and was deeply involved in the Orange Revolution. Another important Ukrainian media NGO was Telekritika which was credited with starting a “Journalists Revolt” during the Orange Revolution directed against Yanukovych.
One of the more bizarre episodes in the lead up to the election was Yushchenko’s poisoning at a small dinner meeting on September 5 2004. with the SBU (Ukraine’s internal intelligence agency) The SBU and MVD were spying on Yanukovych tapping his phone and stealing campaign documents and supplying the information to Yushchenko via his future chief of staff Oleh Rybachuk and to the Jamestown Foundation which had close ties to Dick Cheney. Rybachuk is a suspected former KGB agent with close ties to the SBU. Rybachuk would be rewarded once Yushchenko came to power by becoming deputy Prime Minister for NATO/EU integration and would play a key role organizing the 2014 Maidan coup. Yushchenko was poisoned at a tiny dinner on September 5 2004 with only SBU head Ihor Smeshko his deputy at the SBU Volodymyr Satsiuk, and Yushchenko’s money man David Zhvanis and a possible “5th man in attendance. Rybachuk his SBU liason was strangely absent as was Yushchenko’s head of security and “taster” Yevhen Chervonenko. Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin and despite the fact that he was poisoned by the SBU the media blamed the Russians. Yushchenko ended up hideously scarred but after returning from a foreign hospital his brush with death caused him to drop his usual boring style and briefly endowed him with passionate charisma. No one was ever charged in the poisoning after Yushchenko became president.
The first round of elections was held on October 31 2004 Yushchenko was in the lead with 39.9% of the vote to Yanukovych’s 39.3% and so were to be the two candidates in the second round of elections scheduled for November 21, 2004. Yulia wanted to immediately launch a color revolution but Yushchenko and doubtless the NED decided to wait until after the second round. The Second Round was held and the official result had Yanukovych winning by a small margin 49.5% to Yushchenko’s 46.9%. The western funded exit polls had Yushchenko winning by a wide margin 53% to Yanukovych’s 43%. Yulia Tymoshenko called for a mass protest to overturn the “fraudulent” election. Conveniently the opposition had already rented the stage at Maidan. Also conveniently the U.S. had seemingly paid for hundreds of thousands of Orange T-shirts, Tents and caps Orange was Yushchenko’s campaign color meant to reassure East Ukrainian voters as it was also the colors of the Donetsk soccer team. 100,000 protestors showed up at Maidan square and soon the crowd would grow to 500,000 and may have reached a million at the height of the Orange revolution. Ukrainian fascists joined the protests but would not play a major role as the protsests remained largely peaceful. On November 23 Pora would lead mass protests across Ukraine. Yushchenko stormed the Rada and himself illegally declared himself the President on November 22, 2004. On November 25, 2004 the Supreme court forbade the Central Election Commission from releasing the election results showing Yanukovych as the winner. The U.S., Canada, and the EU all announced that they did not accept the election results. On November 27, 2004 Yanukovych demanded that Kuchma have him announced as president elect and disperse the protesters by force. Kuchma refused saying “you must be very brave to speak to me like that.” According to the New York Times at one point there were plans to use the military to launch a crackdown but they were foiled by the SBU who warned General Popkov not to use the military. The SBU also warned Oleh Rybachuk who called U.S. Ambassador John Herbst who called the Oligarch Victor Pinchuk who was Kuchma’s son in law. Finally on December 3 2004 the U.S. trained Supreme Court justices decided to declare the elections fraudulent and decided to hold an (unconstitutional) 3rd round of scheduled for December 26, 2004. This time Yushchenko won receiving 52% of the vote to Yanukovych’s 44%.
Yushchenko would go on to have UPA leader Roman Shukhevych and OUN/B leader Stepan Bandera declared heroes of Ukraine as well as honoring OUN/B and Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations heads Yaroslav and Stetsko. He would attempt to make the OUN/B version of history the official Ukrainian state version of history. Despite being only minor players in the Orange Revolution Ukraine’s fascists would be among the major beneficiaries. The new official state history had a two pronged approach the first goal was to promote the Holodomor myth and the second was to glorify the OUN-UPA. The Holodomor myth is that the famine of the 1930’s that resulted from forced collectivization and drought was actually a deliberate genocide directed at the Ukrainian nation. The subtext was that the Judeo-Bolsheviks (later Russians became the scapegoat) had tried to destroy Ukraine during the Holodomor and thus any OUN-UPA war crimes or involvement in the Holocaust were a just revenge. The term Holodomor had been invented by the Ukrainian diaspora in the 1970’s after the Holocaust TV miniseries had enraged them by mentioning the role of Ukrainian collaborators. While the famine was real it affected Russians, and Central Asians as much as Ukrainians and was the result of mismanagement not a deliberate scheme to wipe out Ukrainians as even the harshest anti-soviet historians like Robert Conquest admit. Further the famine had only affected Soviet Ukraine not what was then Eastern Poland where the OUN-UPA and their descendants in the diaspora were from.
The process of rewriting Ukraine’s history along nationalist lines had begun under Kravchuk in fact immediately after independence Ukrainian historians petitioned to replace dialectical materialism with “scientific nationalism.” In 1992 OUN/B head Slava Stetsko had held a conference to train Ukrainian historians into how to write history. During the Cold War Ukrainian diaspora historians had been busy churning out their whitewashed version of history and now Ukrainian historians imported this western version of their history, the Soviet version having been discredited in their eyes. The transformation of history was exemplified in the figure of Stanislav Kul’chyts’kyi who transformed himself from the leading Soviet historian to a promoter of the Holodomor and a apologist for the OUN-UPA. Under Kuchma textbooks praised both the Red Army and the OUN-UPA. Kul’chyts’kyi lead a commission of scholars that worked for 5 years to re-evaluate the OUN-UPA. However once Yushchenko became president the process of glorifying the OUN-UPA went into overdrive.
Back in 2002 Volodymyr Viatrovych had been one of the founders of the TsDVR (The Center for the Study of the Liberation Movement) dedicated to glorifying and popularizing Stepan Bandera and the OUN-UPA as heroes of Ukraine. He wrote frequent articles for the OUN B controlled journals “The Path of Victory” and “The Path of Liberation” whitewashing the history of the OUN and UPA. One of his favorite themes was that there was no anti-semitism in the OUN/B and that far from being involved in the Holocaust they were instead involved in rescuing jews. His wife Yaryna Yasynevych ran TsDVR’s publishing house which reprinted OUN ideologues like Bandera, Dontsov and Stetsko. Both Viatrovych and his wife Yasnevych were prominent Pora members during the Orange Revolution. TsDVR was funded by donations from the OUN/B diaspora and the OUN/B head Andrii Haidamakha bragged about it’s creation to a meeting of UPA vets. Starting in January 2004 Viatrovych became an adviser to to future SBU head Nalyvaichenko on his Holodomor publicity campaign “Ukraine Remembers, The World Acknowledges.”
President Yushchenko created the infamous UINP (Ukrainian Institute of National Memory) on May 31, 2006. It’s job was to glorify the OUN-UPA and to promote the Holodomor myth both in Ukraine and internationally. It’s first director was Ihor Iukhnovs’kyi a physicist and politician with no historical training who was a well known sympathizer of the fascist SNPU party. In 2007 Viatrovych was appointed the Lvov representative of the UINP. In 2008 Viatrovych moved to Kiev and was appointed head of the SBU archive working closely with his mentor Nalyvaichenko to falsify Ukrainian history and later became the director of the UINP. In November 2006 the Ukrainian Rada voted to officially recognize the Holodomor as a genocide. Canada, Australia, and Poland followed their example. Yushchenko would champion legislation that would have made it illegal to criticize to historically inaccurate Holodomor myth.
President Yushchenko declared UPA leader Roman Shukhevych a “Hero of Ukraine” on October 12 2007 and gave the award to Shukhevych’s son and UNA-UNSO leader Yurii Shukhevych. It was timed to mark the 65th anniversary of the creation of the UPA and what would have been Shukhevych’s 100th birthday. In the days prior to the award Yuri Shukhevyvh lead a huge march through the streets of Kiev made up of UPA vets and the members of OUN-UNSO and other fascist paramilitaries and far right parties. There were street battles as they were met by counter-protestors made up of Red Army veterans and Communist and Socialist activists. Roman Shukhevych was a notorious war criminal serving in the Nachtigal Battalion, the Auxiliary Police, and lead the UPA. He’d been involved in massacring jews and poles as well as burning Belarusian villagers alive. Back in 2000 a movie glorifying Roman Shukhevych “The Undefeated” had been made and American OUN-B leader Askold Lozynskyj had acted as the main historical adviser. On May 16 2007 President Yushchenko ordered a series of ceremonies honoring Yaroslav and Slava Stetsko who had headed the OUN/B and Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations the world’s largest umbrella organization of aging fascists and former nazi collaborators. The Stetsko’s were to be glorified in the media, streets and plaques were to be named after them and there were plans to set up a museum in their honor. A special ceremony was held at their former headquarters in Munich.
Late in 2008 the Ukrainian Rada decided that the year 2009 would be dedicated to a nationwide celebration of the 100th anniversary of Stepan Bandera’s birthday January 1, 1909. Two new Stepan Bandera monuments were unveiled and on December 22, 2008 President Yushchenko gave a speech in Bandera’s honor. On October 14, 2009 there was a huge march held to honor Stepan Bandera in Kiev. Finally and most infamously President Yushchenko declared Stepan Bandera “A Hero of Ukraine” on Jan 28, 2010 and praised his “Unbreakable spirit in defending the national Idea.” Yushchenko presented the award to Bandera’s Canadian Ukrainian grandson Stepan Bandera III who had become a superstar in Ukrainian nationalist circles and frequent guest whenever statues, museums, streets were named in his grandfather’s honor. The move sparked international controversy and was criticized by jewish groups world wide. It also provoked the great Bandera debate of 2010-2011 among scholars journalists and intellectuals. The debate pitted those critical of Bandera like Rossolinski Liebe Rudling, and Himka against Bandera’s liberal apologists and fascist defenders. The EU Parliament also condemned the decision to recognize Bandera as a “Hero of Ukraine”. Meanwhile in Canada the president of the UCC (Ukrainian Canadian Congress) hoped that Canada’s education system would also glorify the OUN-UPA and that UPA vets would get government benefits. This was what had touched off the “Great Bandera Debate” Declaring Bandera a “Hero of Ukraine” was to be one of Yushchenko’s final acts as he had just lost badly in the 1st round of the presidential election with only 5.4% of the vote. Ironically after all the sound and fury of the Orange Revolution Yanukovych would be elected the next president of Ukraine.
But before I address this turn of events let’s examine the often bizarre ways Stepan Bandera and the OUN-UPA are celebrated in Ukraine. I’ll quote historian Rossolinski-Liebe “The Bandera cult in post-Soviet Ukraine took many more varied forms than it had in the diaspora during the Cold War. In post-Soviet Ukraine the cult was popularized by politics, historiography, museums, novels, movies, monuments, street names, political events, music festivals, pubs, food, stamps, talk shows and other means.” There are at least 3 Stepan Bandera museums in Ukraine. There were over 30 monuments to Stepan Bandera in Ukraine by 2009. Andriy Puribiy the SNPU co-founder headed the committee to construct the most famous Bandera monument in Ukraine located in Lvov. There a 14 foot statue of Bandera stands on a 6 foot pedestal. President Yushchenko was among those who sent wreathes when it was unveiled October 13, 2007. It was blessed by 2 priests representing the Greek Catholic Church and the Ukrainian Orthodox church and a huge crowd attended many dressed in fascist uniforms or Ukrainian folk costumes. Leading to the monument are streets named after Bandera and Roman Shukhevych. Many newlyweds and tourists have their photo taken there. Lviv is proudly known as Bandera city.
The fascist National Alliance hold a yearly music festival called Bandershtat near Lutsk in Volhynia. Participants hold mock battles in UPA and NKVD uniforms and the crowd arranges itself to spell out Bandera for an aerial photograph. In 2007 a UPA themed pub called Kryivka opened in Lvov guests are greeted by an waiter in a UPA uniform with the phrase “glory to Ukraine” the pub is decorated with photos of the OUN-UPA and the menu is full of racist jokes. In 2008 A Bandera Biker Club was formed. There are a number of novels glorifying the OUN-UPA one an alternative history novel called “Parade in Moscow” features Stepan Bandera being saluted by the victorious axis troops as he stands next to Hitler who in this reality wisely backed the OUN controlled Ukraine and as a result won the war in the fall of 1941. There have been two movies glorifying Stepan Bandera. In 2007-2008 Stepan Bandera was voted number three on the list of the Ten greatest Ukrainians on a TV series called “Great Ukrainians” and was the subject of a hagiographic documentary. In cities without Stepan Bandera monuments naming streets after him and putting up plaques in his is a low cost alternative. Another feature of the Bandera cult are huge torch lit marches by crowds carrying Stepan Bandera’s portrait often organized by fascist paramilitary groups. Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych were both honored with Ukrainian postal service stamps for the 100th anniversaries of their births in 2007 and 2009. Bandera and the OUN-UPA are celebrated in poetry, art, and song. Bandera is the subject of numerous fawning biographies in Ukrainian that completely ignore the crimes of the OUN-UPA. With all this promotion Bandera and the OUN-UPA’s popularity in opinion polls would steadily rise in 2010 20% of Ukrainians had a “positive attitude” to Stepan Bandera the number would rise to 31% by 2014 and reach 35% by 2016. Support for the OUN-UPA would rise from 22% in 2013 to 43% by 2022.
Yushchenko’s downfall was caused by his disastrous economic policies, his constant fights with Yulia Tymoshenko, an endless series of scandals, his pandering to the nationalists, and his unpopular plan to join NATO which was opposed by a majority of Ukrainians. His wife Kateryna was involved in a series of scandals and was accused of running a “kitchen cabinet” behind the scenes. Before leaving office Kuchma had “reformed” the constitution making the Rada more powerful and the President less powerful a backroom deal the opposition had agreed to. There were a series of Gas crises with Russia caused by Ukraine stealing natural gas on it’s way to Europe and Russia’s desire to raise prices to punish it’s increasingly hostile neighbor. By September of 2006 Yushchenko had “fired” Tymoshenko as Prime Minister. The Rada rebelling at his plans to join NATO forced him to make Yanukovych his prime minister. Yulia would return as Prime Minister by 2009 the year of another gas crises. In the meantime Yushchenko’s popularity had plummeted. He tried to delay the election as long as possible but finally it was held in 2010 in the first round Yushchenko got only 5.4% of the vote Yanukovych got 30% and Yulia Tymoshenko got 25%. In the second round Yanukovych won with 50% while Tymoshenko received 46% of the vote in an election the OSCE certified as free and fair. The stage was thus set for the “Maidan Revolution” civil war/NATO-Russia proxy war that would follow. Hopefully I will deal with these events in sixth and final part of this series next year.
Sources
Once again I read a bunch of books on Ukraine some more relevant to previous articles and some more relevant to the future part 6 which will conclude this series on Ukrainian fascism.
Moss Robeson lecture on the Ukraine Lobby or the “Bandera Lobby” as he calls it since it is controlled by the OUN/B. He also discusses a number of fascist paramilitary groups in Ukraine
https://youtu.be/_3qAEGAxCUU?si=RZ2LWbeFfdAH7EsJ
Moss Robeson has two blogs that provide invaluable and detailed information on the OUN/B and it’s heirs in Ukraine
The Bandera Lobby
https://banderalobby.substack.com
Ukes, Kooks, and Spooks
https://mossrobeson.medium.com
“Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide and Cult” by Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe is a must read serving as the main source for this series it is the definitive book on the OUN/B. It’s possibly inspired two other Ukraine specialists to come out with books covering the controversial history of the OUN-UPA.
First there is John-Paul Himka’s “Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust OUN and UPA’s Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry 1941-1944”. Raised in the pro-OUN Ukrainian Diaspora Himka rebelled in the 1990’s against the glorification of the OUN-UPA and began to write about their war crimes. He retains however his anti-soviet and russophobic biases (I’ve encountered some of his absurd “hot takes” on the current war in various articles and online interviews) and a certain urge to rationalize the crimes of Ukrainians. Still his book provides a detailed examination of the OUN-UPA during World War 2.
The second is relevant to the period covered in this article “Tarnished Heroes: The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in the Memory Politics of Post-Soviet Ukraine” by Per A Rudling. It covers how the discipline of history in Ukraine has been completely hijacked by OUN apologists like Viatrovych and has been embraced by Ukraine’s liberals as well. Unfortunately it fails to cover Ukraine’s far right political parties and fascist paramilitaries although Rudling wrote an excellent essay on Svoboda it isn’t included. Even more unfortunate is the anti-Russian rant that takes up the final chapter although the book as a whole is fairly valuable and objective with some great photos of marches glorifying Stefan Bandera.
Rudling’s article on Svoboda
https://www.academia.edu/2481420/_The_Return_of_the_Ukrainian_Far_Right_The_Case_of_VO_Svoboda_in_Ruth_Wodak_and_John_E_Richardson_eds_Analyzing_Fascist_Discourse_European_Fascism_in_Talk_and_Text_London_and_New_York_Routledge_2013_228_255
Another book on the same topic but from a more pro-Ukrainian perspective is David Marples’ “Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine” which documents how Ukrainian history was transformed from pro Soviet to Pro-OUN-UPA from the early 1990’s to the aftermath of the Orange Revolution. It should only be read by people familiar with the actual history of the OUN-UPA from Rossolinski-Liebe and Himka as Marples (a former employee of RFE/RL) often fails to correct the blatant lies Ukrainian historians tell to falsify OUN-UPA history.
The Turn to the Right: The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism 1919-1929 by Alexander J Motyl is worth reading for those wanting to understand OUN ideology and the history of Ukrainian nationalism during and after the Russian Revolution. It should be read with caution as Motyl is a hardcore nationalist and OUN apologist and former writer for the CIA front Prolog but his book was the major english language work on the OUN to come out after Armstrong’s “Ukrainian Nationalism”
Free PDF of The Turn to the Right
https://bannedthought.net/USSR/Nationalities/TheTurnToTheRight-TheIdeologicalOriginsAndDevelopmentOfUkrainianNationalism-1919-1929-Motyl-1980-OCR.pdf
“The New Cold War: Revolutions, Rigged elections, and Pipeline Politics in the Former Soviet Union” by Canadian journalist Mark MacKinnon is despite it’s pro-western bias a good book covering color revolutions, the war in Chechnya, the new great game in Central Asia and other topics including in depth coverage of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. Published in 2007 it had a prescient title.
From the Fires of War: Ukraine’s Azov Movement and the Global Far Right by Michael Colborne provides a detailed account of the Azov movement it’s complex and eclectic ideology (similar to Dugin in Russia) and it’s vast network of front groups. Colborne worked for the open source intelligence front Bellingcat.
Ukrainian nationalism in the 1990’s: A Minority Faith by Andrew Wilson is a useful book covering Ukrainian independence and the new far right nationalist movements up into the mid 1990’s.
Radical Nationalist Parties and Movements in Contemporary Ukraine Before and After Independence the Right and it’s politics 1989-1994 by Taras Kuzio covers the early years of the fascist revival in Ukraine. Kuzio was part of the CIA’s Prolog Research front group created by war criminal Mykola Lebed.
https://shron1.chtyvo.org.ua/Taras_Kuzio/Radical_nationalist_parties_and_movements_in_contemporary_Ukraine_before_and_after_independence_The.pdf?PHPSESSID=45b9buug12nrfbb3odt3ns6a13
Ukraine’s Orange Revolution also by Andrew Wilson is a detailed but deeply biased account of the Orange Revolution. It’s provides interesting dirt on Ukraine’s oligarchs and politicians but states certain events involving election fraud as fact which subsequent investigation by the Ukrainian Government (lead by the oft mentioned SBU chief Nalyvaichenko) failed to prove occurred as discussed in the Events in Ukraine substack articles below)
A great substack Events in Ukraine covers recent history and current events plus the author gave me some book recommendations (New Cold War, The Tragedy of Ukraine)
Events in Ukraine’s great substack article on the Orange Revolution and Yushchenko’s wife Kateryna Yushchenko (formerly Chumachenko)“Washington’s Female Rasputin in Kiev the CIA and the SBU Part II”
https://eventsinukraine.substack.com/p/washingtons-rasputin-in-kiev-the?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
And it’s sequel “Organ Stealing by the CIA: The CIA and the SBU part III” on Yuschneko’s SBU head Valentyn Nalyvaichenko’s close ties to Ukrainian fascists (he’s godfather to Right Sector founder Dmytro Yarosh’s children)
https://eventsinukraine.substack.com/p/organ-stealing-by-the-cia
Great interview with Events in Ukraine author Peter Korotaev on the background to the Orange Revolution
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3tvhHOZckAoBIcrGLhhQ0U
“Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia the West and the “New Cold War”” by Gordon M. Hahn is one of the best books on the roots of the 2014 Ukraine War and also covers NATO expansion, and the Orange Revolution.
Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands by Richard Sakwa covers the roots of the 2014 Ukraine war, divisions in Ukraine and the Orange Revolution from a fairly balanced perspective.
Ukraine in the Crossfire by Chris Kaspar de Ploeg is a great book on the Ukraine war of 2014 and the rampant corruption in Ukraine. I recommend you read it and Hahns book while you’re waiting for part 6 of this series to come out next year.
Neonazis & Euromaidan: From Democracy to Dictatorship by Stanislav Byshok & Alexey Kochetkov provides background on the history of Svoboda, Right Sector and the Maidan coup from a Russian perspective. It’s out of print but available in PDF form online in the 2 links below
https://archive.org/details/neonazis_euromaidan_-_2nd_edition
https://www.academia.edu/33258630/_EN_Neonazis_and_Euromaidan_From_Democracy_to_Dictatorship
Ukraine: Zbig’s Grand Chessboard & How the West Was Checkmated by Natylie Baldwin & Kermit Heartsong covers the 2014 war in Ukraine, geopolitics, and NATO expansion from a pro-Russia alt-media perspective.
Pogromchik: The Assassination of Simon Petlura by Saul S. Freedman covers the pogroms that took place in Ukraine during the Russian civil war in which OUN founder Konovalets fought alongside Simon Petliura. Petliura was assassinated by a jewish anarchist in Paris and the ensuing trial became an international sensation. Ukrainian nationalism itself was put on trial and the assassin was acquitted. It was fascinating to see the Ukrainian exiles attempting to whitewash Petliura’s history the way 100 year later they are attempting to whitewash the history of the OUN-UPA.
Towards the Abyss: Ukraine From Maidan to War is by Volodymyr Ishchenko a west Ukrainian marxist who was forced into exile. It contains interesting analysis of color revolutions and fascism in Ukraine but often uncritically accepts mainstream narratives such as ignoring the mountains of evidence that have since emerged that the Maidan snipers were Ukrainian fascists firing from buildings the protestors controlled and not Yanukovych’s police.
I only had time to read a few sections of The Tragedy of Ukraine: What Classical Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution by Nicolai N. Petro but what I read was excellent. Petro writes about the divisions in Ukraine that lead to the 2014 war.
A series of editorials in the Guardian on Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” were an early expose of the U.S. role in color revolutions
Ukraine’s Postmodern Coup d’etat
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/26/ukraine.comment
US Campaign Behind the Turmoil in Kiev
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/26/ukraine.usa
The Price of People Power
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/dec/07/ukraine.comment
New York Times on how Ukrainian Intelligence worked behind the scenes to insure the success of the Orange Revolution
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/17/world/europe/how-top-spies-in-ukraine-changed-the-nations-path.html
Azov movement’s planned European tour
https://www.theleftchapter.com/post/azov-on-the-road-neo-nazi-brigade-tours-europe-appearances-also-planned-in-germany?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR34_p9QOmDkwqHIcz-y4WVweFm5bLzmozjr_3JgWxp-WzT6EAtXJWd8g7k_aem_BMYBfPcnR65EKNQ1HfeOaQ
Azov Movement European tour cancelled
https://www.theleftchapter.com/post/after-protests-azov-events-in-hamburg-and-berlin-cancelled
Moss Robeson on the death of former OUN/B head Stefan Romaniw
https://banderalobby.substack.com/p/australia-bid-farewell-to-a-leading
Moss Robeson on the current head of the OUN/B Oleh Medunytsia
https://banderalobby.substack.com/p/new-sheriff-in-town
Radio War Nerd episode 46 covers Georgia’s civil wars in the 1990’s and the 2008 Russo-Georgia war. You probably have to subscribe to listen but they have a number of great wars on obscure wars, operation gladio, Russia, Ukraine and current events
https://www.patreon.com/posts/radio-war-nerd-6570213?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_fan&utm_content=web_share
Mark Ames on Yushchenko’s downfall and the outcry he provoked by declaring Stepan Bandera a “Hero of Ukraine”
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/hero-orange-revolution-poisons-ukraine/
The Farm Podcast did a long series as a sequel to their WACL series called WACL redux that discussed Kateryna Yushchenko
https://open.spotify.com/episode/176pAh3j9Faf5NVrySMfpp - Hugo Turner
https://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2024/12/history-of-fascism-in-ukraine-part-5.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger