Marking the ninth anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Vladimir Putin recently visited the peninsula after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest. “U.S. Warms to Helping Ukraine Target Crimea,” the New York Times reported in mid-January, months after an article on “How Ukraine Blew Up a Key Russian Bridge [to Crimea]” conceded that the sensational attack “triggered a month of Russian airstrikes.”
[T]he Biden administration does not think that Ukraine can take Crimea militarily — and indeed, there are still worries that such a move could drive Mr. Putin to retaliate with an escalatory response. But, officials said, their assessment now is that Russia needs to believe that Crimea is at risk, in part to strengthen Ukraine’s position in any future negotiations.
A couple days later, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited the “Ukrainian Village” neighborhood in Chicago, accompanied by Senate Ukraine Caucus co-chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL). Pavlo Bandriwsky, the local leader of the OUN-B, or clandestine “Banderite” faction of the far-right Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, moderated a roundtable discussion between Blinken, Durbin, and representatives of Chicago’s Ukrainian community.
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Meanwhile, the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos that “victory” without Crimea would be “absolutely unacceptable,” and a delegation from the United States arrived in Kyiv as part of an annual trip to Ukraine organized by the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC), a neoconservative think tank in Washington.
Probably the AFPC’s most important meeting was with Oleksiy Danilov, an influential national security advisor to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council. The delegation’s main takeaway from the trip was that the war “must come full circle with Crimea as the central objective,” according to Newsweek.
In keeping with tradition, the AFPC delegation was joined by a Ukrainian American OUN-B member. As usual, that was Mykola Hryckowian, who is president of the Organization for Defense of the Four Freedoms for Ukraine (ODFFU). Pavlo Bandriwsky in Chicago is a vice president of the ODFFU, which OUN-B members from western Ukraine established at the dawn of the Cold War. During World War II, many Banderites collaborated with the Nazis and participated in the Holocaust.
The AFPC building in Washington houses the (Hryckowian-led) DC bureau of the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations, another Banderite “facade structure” created by the ODFFU and the “informational arm” of the Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation (UAFF), which owns 40% of the OUN-B headquarters building in Ukraine. The UAFF’s treasurer is the brother of Pavlo Bandriwsky.
Once I randomly met AFPC president Herman Pirchner after not sleeping for more than 24 hours and I somewhat incoherently tried to tell him who he’s dealing with (OUN-B). Pirchner seemed happy just to be recognized by a young stranger who was amazed to meet him. I had recently heard a rumor that he was a CIA cutout for the OUN-B leadership of the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations.
Herman Pirchner, an inner circle member of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive right-wing umbrella organization in the United States, led the January 2023 delegation to Ukraine, which included fellow CNP member Brent Bozell III, the founder of a right-wing “media watchdog” organization who once said that Barack Obama looks like a “skinny, ghetto crackhead” on Fox News.
Also tagging along with the AFPC was Hannah Thoburn, a senior staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and William Schneider Jr., a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs (1982-86).
Thoburn, a self-described “ex-think tanker” (Hudson Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Brookings Institute) who used to live in Crimea, wrote an articleabout the Kremlin’s weaponization of Ukrainian antisemitism as the Russian annexation unfolded in 2014.
Twenty five years ago, Schneider signed a letter to President Clinton from the neoconservative Project for a New American Century, urging him to launch a regime change operation against Iraq and declare “a willingness to undertake military action.” Schneider ushered in the 21st century, according to journalist Seymour Hersh, with a group of conservative think tankers that “recommended treating tactical nuclear weapons as an essential part of the U.S. arsenal.”
These people are not too concerned about “suicidal nationalism,” or nuclear escalation over Crimea. They were greeted in Ukraine by Ostap Kryvdyk, a longtime assistant to far-right politician Andriy Parubiy and a representative of the “Ukrainian Strategic Initiative,” yet another OUN-B front group that typically hosts the AFPC delegation in Ukraine. Kryvdyk is the “International Secretary” of the “Free Ukraine Resistance Movement” (FURM) — “our Front,” according to an ODFFU memo by Hryckowian. The FURM is another name for the “Capitulation Resistance Movement” that the OUN-B formed in 2019 with allies in Ukraine to sabotage Volodymyr Zelensky’s original peacemaking agenda.
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In 2014, Mykola Hryckowian moderated the first meeting of an “Ad Hoc Committee on Ukraine” (AHCU) spearheaded by Ukrainian American OUN-B members and their AFPC allies. According to Hryckowian, the AHCU coordinated the Ukrainian community’s successful lobbying efforts to support the Ukraine Freedom Support Act of 2014, which authorized the White House to provide military aid to Ukraine. The following year, the AHCU “facilitated” far-right politician Andriy Parubiy’s first tour of the United States, accompanied by his foreign policy advisor, Ostap Kryvdyk. When a journalist called out Parubiy for his neo-Nazi past at an AFPC event in 2018, Herman Pirchner intervened with a non-sequitur defending Stepan Bandera.
In the spring of 2021, the “Capitulation Resistance Movement” held a webinar with Mykola Hryckowian, tuning in from New York City, and Dmytro Yarosh, the founder of the neo-fascist Right Sector movement, two years after Yarosh said that Zelensky will be lynched if he “betrays Ukraine.”
A month later, the “Ukrainian Strategic Initiative,” chaired by the deputy OUN-B leader and chief coordinator of the “Resistance Movement,” hosted the AFPC and friends (including Hryckowian and a former Special Assistant to President Trump) for the 7th time since 2014. They met with the “distinguished” representatives of the “Resistance Movement.” The AFPC didn’t sponsor another trip to Ukraine until January 2023. Last year, Pavlo Bandriwsky donated $100,000 to the FURM, which has been described as a “partisan outfit.”
January 22 is the Day of Unity of Ukraine, which commemorates the symbolic unification of the country in 1919 during the Ukrainian–Soviet War, shortly before the Red Army captured Kyiv. Roughly 48 hours after the AFPC delegation arrived in the Ukrainian capital and Tony Blinken visited Chicago, the Banderite-dominated Illinois Division of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA) celebrated Unity Day by declaring 2023 the “Year of Victory.” Pavlo Bandriwsky, as vice president of the UCCA Illinois Division, is said to have “masterfully led” the Chicago event.
The first keynote speech was delivered by Alexander Vindman, the Ukrainian-born retired U.S. army officer who served on Donald Trump’s National Security Council and testified to Congress about Trump’s scandalous phone call with Zelensky pressuring Ukraine to investigate the Biden family. The other keynote speaker was Janusz Bugajski, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, which last summer published his newest book, Failed State: A Guide to Russia's Rupture, predicting the violent collapse of the Russian Federation.
Other special guest speakers included Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, Senator Durbin, and a few more Democratic Congressmen (Danny Davis, Mike Quigley, and Raja Krishnamoorthi). Recipients of a community service award included the founder of a local charity that has partnered with an arm of the neo-Nazi Azov movement.
A couple days later, in the middle of the AFPC’s trip to Kyiv and Odessa, the US announced that it would send tanks to Ukraine after all, and Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote about Tony Blinken’s “strategy for the Ukrainian endgame” after an interview with the Secretary of State.
There is a widespread view in Washington and Kyiv that regaining Crimea by military force may be impossible. Any Ukrainian military advances this year in Zaporizhzhia oblast, the land bridge that connects Crimea and Russia, could threaten Russian control. But an all-out Ukrainian campaign to seize the Crimean Peninsula is unrealistic, many U.S. and Ukrainian officials believe. That’s partly because Putin has indicated that an assault on Crimea would be a tripwire for nuclear escalation.
Later that month, after the Croatian president said, “It is clear that Crimea will never again be part of Ukraine,” the Washington Post reported that Ukraine’s military intelligence chief remained confident, “Crimea will be returned to us. I’ll tell you more: It all started in Crimea in 2014, and it will all end there.” Less than 24 hours after these words appeared in the newspaper, Politico revealedthat “four senior Defense Department officials told House Armed Services Committee lawmakers in a classified briefing” that recapturing Crimea is unrealistic.
Then Alexander Vindman made his case in Foreign Affairs: “What Ukraine Needs to Liberate Crimea — A Credible Military Threat Might Be Enough.” But writing for War on the Rocks, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace pointed out a “potentially catastrophic mistake” in using Crimea to strengthen Ukraine’s position at the negotiating table: “If Kyiv is unwilling to make concessions over the peninsula’s status, it cannot credibly use Crimea as a bargaining chip.”
The Zelensky government is probably terrified of the domestic repercussions for “surrendering” Crimea to the Russians, making the White House mantra, “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” a very dangerous one. Entertaining nationalist and war hawk fantasies about making the “liberation” of Crimea “the central objective” of the war is a potentially suicidal gamble, and could lay the foundation of a 21st century stab-in-the-back myth.
Ben Hodges, the former commanding general of the U.S. army in Europe, who retired from the military in 2018, has been one of the biggest cheerleaders for attacking Crimea. Until recently, he held the “Pershing Chair in Strategic Studies” at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), which is funded by the U.S. government and arms industry. As one journalist put it, CEPA is “an exceptionally deranged pro-war think tank, even within the universe of deranged pro-war think tanks.”
Two years ago, the “Bandera Lobby Blog” reported that “Hodges’ unhinged comments” were a highlight of the “US-Ukraine Security Dialogue” that the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations (CUSUR), an OUN-B front group, held in the early days of the Biden administration. Hodges regularly participates in CUSUR conferences.
“General Ben” imparted various words of war hawk wisdom, such as “great power competition prevents great power conflict,” and let’s not forget: “it was actually millions of Ukrainians, not millions of Russians,” that died fighting the Nazis in World War II. “Last point I’d make, we need a NATO headquarters where everybody wakes up in the morning smelling the Black Sea…”
On Unity Day 2023, an NPR story about sending tanks to Ukraine quoted Ben Hodges. “The Ukrainians know that the decisive terrain is Crimea,” he said, suggesting that tanks from the West might form “the spearhead of a force that could break through those Russian defenses down towards Mariupol… The purpose is to continue the isolation of Crimea from everything else.”
A week later, Hodges told Business Insider, “The decisive terrain for this war is Crimea. The Ukrainian government knows that they cannot settle for Russia retaining control of Crimea… The next few months will see Ukraine setting the conditions for the eventual liberation of Crimea.”
After another week, “General Ben” appeared on CNN for a lengthy interview to argue that Ukraine can and should retake Crimea with Western support. Erik Sperling, the executive director of Just Foreign Policy, commented that Hodges “appears unaware of the widely-acknowledged possibility that Putin could go nuclear.”
Anatol Lieven, director of the Eurasia program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, soon wrote for Jacobin, “Whether the Ukraine war brings on a global catastrophe will hinge in large part on whether Washington decides to back a Ukrainian effort to retake the Crimean peninsula.”
In mid-February, Tony Blinken privately admitted that Crimea “would be a red line for Vladimir Putin,” according to Politico. Reportedly, “he conveyed that the U.S. isn’t actively encouraging Ukraine to retake Crimea, but that the decision is Kyiv’s alone.” Of Politico’s four sources that heard Blinken’s comments, two understood that he opposes the idea, but the other two felt “that Blinken was more open to a potential Ukrainian play for Crimea.” The following day, Victoria Nuland, the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (and former foreign policy advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney), told the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
Ukraine is not gonna be safe unless Crimea is, at a minimum, at a minimum, demilitarized… so I’m not gonna pre-judge where the Ukrainians choose to fight, or how they choose to deal with Crimea over the short-term, medium-term, or long-term… There are mass military installations on Crimea… Those are legitimate targets. Ukraine is hitting them and we are supporting that… [The war] has to end with a strategic failure for Putin.
A few days later, Michael McFaul, the influential former U.S. Ambassador to Russia (2012-14), told his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, “Putin will negotiate if he is losing in Ukraine. He will only feel like he is losing if he has to worry about losing Crimea. Giving Ukraine weapons to threaten Crimea therefore could speed up an end to the war.” In the meantime, Politico once again dumped cold water on this fantasy, reporting that the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee admitted, “I think there’s more of a consensus out there that people realize that Ukraine is not going to militarily retake Crimea.”
In late February, after a week of growing calls for Washington to support an attempt to “liberate Crimea,” including an op-ed in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof sharing Ben Hodges’ assessment that Ukraine could accomplish this “by the end of the summer,” the Ukrainian American Banderites held a virtual “town hall” and another “US-Ukraine Security Dialogue” conference in Washington.
On February 26, the UCCA and ODFFU co-sponsored a webinar (“Every War Must End”) with retired U.S. general Wesley Clark, a former NATO commander in Europe, and Phillip Karber, the president of the Potomac Foundation. Clark and Karber are friends of the “Bandera Lobby.” The former NATO commander was the inaugural recipient of the International Council in Support of Ukraine (ICSU)’s “Pinnacle Award” in 2015. The ICSU is the English name for the global coordinating body of OUN-B “facade structures,” that is chaired by the “external affairs officer” of ODFFU, and a leader of the “Free Ukraine Resistance Movement.”
Wes Clark had a scheduling conflict, so he robbed the UCCA communications director (an ODFFU member) of his opening words. Making a video call from the passenger seat of a moving car, Clark insisted that “Crimea is what Putin values the most,” and the pressure point to force the Russian president to “come to the table, if not to surrender, but to get as much as he can before he loses it.”
So this is the military objective that has to be resourced. We need to give Ukraine what it needs to successfully attack and take Crimea, and then, let’s see what happens…
Mykola Hryckowian moderated the event, who boasted that “we’ve got the two top people with us tonight.” He turned things over to “my dear friend” and “colleague,” Phil Karber, who gave a presentation. Karber suggested the war has three possible outcomes: an “ugly win” for Russia, a dubious ceasefire, or a “miracle win” for Ukraine. Going for the latter, Karber predicted that Ukraine could triumph with Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) manufactured by Lockheed Martin. At one point, Karber seemed to mock the Biden administration that has so far refused to send these long-range weapons to Ukraine: “wE dO nOt wAnT tO eScAlAtE.”
Roughly 24 hours after Russia invaded Ukraine last year, Karber visited the U.S. headquarters of OUN-B in Manhattan. In July 2022, he delivered a “war report” at the OUN-B affiliated Ukrainian American Youth Association summer camp in Ellenville, New York as part of their religious “Heroes’ Holiday” worshipping Nazi collaborators. Karber was introduced by Hryckowian, who is named after his father, a veteran of the OUN-B’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army that helped to build the summer camp’s cultish “Heroes’ Monument.” For decades, Ellenville has been a point of pilgrimage for OUN-B members around the world, in part because of its larger than life bust of Stepan Bandera (1909-59) that went up three years after the KGB assassinated him.
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When Wesley Clark hopped back on the livestream, he complained that U.S. military assistance has been “very, very marginal” compared to what is necessary for Ukraine to have its “miracle win.”
I think we’ve given a total of 180 tubes of 155[mm artillery shells] from the United States to Ukraine, but look, that’s a 600 mile front… What the Ukraine needs is 500 tubes, 500 tanks, and the ATACMS, and a thousand or more armored fighting vehicles to get this offensive underway. And as Dr. Karber was trying to say, the longer this goes on, the greater the chance that Russia will, either through production or through its allies—China, Iran, and North Korea—bring in sufficient power to overwhelm Ukraine… So we’ve got a window of opportunity here, but we’ve got to dramatically increase the rate of assistance that we’re providing…
In response to a question from Mykola Hryckowian, the former NATO commander doubled down on advocating for an escalation of the war, and called for an end to “fudging-headed thinking, so time for this policy to change.”
I think it’s time that the United States stop allowing Russia to view itself as a sanctuary… No matter what the escalation potential is, you can’t fight and win a battlefield if you can’t isolate the battlefield. Not only ATACMS, but going beyond the full boundaries of Ukraine to strike at their communications hubs, their railroads, the factories, the airfields, in Russia, that are supporting the conflict. Push the conflict zone deeper. That’s the answer, and if it results in a certain destruction of the Russian economy, that’s fair and proper, and Mr. Putin’s going to have to accept that. I mean, why are we allowing Russia to savage Ukraine without requiring, or enabling, Ukraine to strike back at Russia?
A couple days later, on February 28, the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations (CUSUR) convened its 15th annual “US-Ukraine Security Dialogue” at the National Press Club in Washington. As usual, the conference was co-sponsored by the American Foreign Policy Council and got started with words of welcome from Walter Zaryckyj, the executive director of CUSUR and president of the Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation who has served as the OUN-B “commandant” in the United States.
Retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges participated virtually in the first panel session, following comments from John Herbst, the senior director of the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council (and George W. Bush’s former ambassador to Ukraine)—another regular at CUSUR conferences. Just over a week earlier, CEPA’s online journal published an article by Hodges: “Ukraine’s Road to Victory Runs Through Crimea.”
General Ben reminded his CUSUR audience “to keep in mind that this war started in 2014,” when Russia took Crimea, which “is the decisive terrain for this entire war.” Looking into the camera, he emphasized that the history of the conflict “shows what failed deterrence looks like,” because in 2014, Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula and started “helping the so-called separatists, and we basically did nothing.” Hodges even suggested that the Biden administration doesn’t want Ukraine to win.
And then you’ll have leaders saying empty things, like ‘We’re in it for as long as it takes,’ without ever specifying what ‘it’ is. Or they’ll say things like ‘this is gonna be a long war.’ It doesn’t have to be. It could be over this year, if the United States decided that we want Ukraine to win… this does not have to be a long war. It’s up to us, but we have to have the clarity.
Hodges told the Banderites, and think tankers (from the AFPC, Jamestown Foundation, Atlantic Council, Hudson Institute, etc.), and others gathered that day, “we’ve gotta disabuse ourself of the idea that Ukraine cannot defeat [Russia], because I think this causes us to deter ourselves. I think that everybody listening already gets this, but I think we’ve got to continue to pound away at the fairy tale…”
Meanwhile, NBC News aired “A rare look inside Crimea…” after senior international correspondent Keir Simmons led a team that visited Sevastopol and interviewed some people living there. That afternoon, Simmons appeared on MSNBC. “Keir, President Zelensky vowed on Sunday to take back Crimea,” Andrea Mitchell said with a skeptical tone, and lightly scoffing. “How realistic is that? The people there you spoke to view themselves as Russian.”
SIMMONS: It’s a very, very dangerous stand off… It’s hard to see how you reach negotiation over that. And there in Sevastopol, Andrea, I’ve got to tell you, there was just military everywhere, absolutely everywhere. It is a military town, so again, when Victoria Nuland talks, ‘at the very least, we want Crimea to be demilitarized,’ I found myself standing there and wondering, how on earth does that happen?
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