| Greenlighting the 'Pantheon of Heroes' |
This post can be considered part one in a Bandera Lobby Blog series which is adapted from an article of mine that appeared in the left-wing German newspaper Junge Welt. According to Substack, this is too long for some to read as emails.
Introduction
Several weeks ago, the New York Times made waves with the headline, “Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History.” Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera (1909-59), perhaps the thorniest of all, went unnamed in the article. Whereas neo-Nazis are well known to have penetrated the Ukrainian military since 2014, the OUN-B, or Bandera’s faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which irrefutably still exists, has quietly been at the forefront of the far-right hijacking of the memory politics of Ukraine.
Readers may already know what is arguably the most important part of this story. It may sound like an unhinged conspiracy theory cooked up in the Kremlin, but after the so-called “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014, the OUN-B and likeminded nationalists seized control of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINM) and the archives of the Security Service of Ukraine. OUN-B member Volodymyr Viatrovych led the state UINM from 2014-19 and was the chief architect of Ukraine’s “decommunization” in that period. As of 2023, Banderites still loom large in the institution, and he is “satisfied with the Banderization of Ukraine.”
For years, Ukrainian nationalists have wanted a sacred “Pantheon of Heroes” at the historical Askold’s Grave park in Kyiv, hoping to make this the final resting place for a number of Ukrainians buried abroad, especially Stepan Bandera in Munich. On June 27, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky expressed support for its creation, and “the reburial of all our heroes.” Months earlier, he was urged to do so in an online petition by Alina Mykhailova, a far-right member of the Kyiv City Council, shortly after the death of her fiancée, Dmytro Kotsiubailo, commander of the Right Sector-affiliated “Da Vinci Wolves” battalion.
 |
Mykhailova’s petition named Bandera among other Ukrainians that should be reburied there: Yevhen Konovalets, an anti-Polish terrorist leader and founder of the pro-Nazi Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), assassinated in Rotterdam in 1938; Symon Petliura, the Ukrainian leader whose military forces were responsible for a large part of the 1919 pogroms in Ukraine, for which he was killed in Paris in 1926; and Pavlo Skoropadsky—whose first and last breath was in Germany—the puppet “Hetman” of Kiev installed by the Germans in 1918, and later ousted by Petliura and Konovalets. Hoping for Skoropadsky to return to power as Hitler’s man in Ukraine, the pro-Nazi “Hetmanites” vied with the OUN for Berlin’s support.
Considering Russia invaded Ukraine under the pretext of “de-Nazification,” how could Zelensky justify giving his blessing for such a scandalous project? For starters, he could point to the Reanimation Package of Reforms (RPR), the “largest and most visible reform network” in Ukraine, which has been funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Global Affairs Canada, the EU Delegation to Ukraine, the United Nations Development Programme, and other prominent donors.
“In many ways, RPR is the central hub of many other civil society organizations and the most influential channel for the implementation of reforms,” according to a report by Razom for Ukraine, which is the premier Ukrainian American organization. Chatham House, a prominent British think tank, observed in 2017, “This coalition of 70 NGOs proposed its own plan to reform Ukraine, and has facilitated the adoption of around 120 new laws in parliament.”
A year later, the RPR Coalition established a “Transatlantic Task Force for Ukraine” with the German Marshall Fund of the United States. In 2019, Toronto hosted the international Ukraine Reform Conference (URC), and a leader of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress said that the RPR Coalition “represents virtually all the major reform sectors and effectively co-ordinates their lobbying work.” The RPR Coalition appears to have a special relationship with the annual URC, a high-level event that was renamed the Ukraine Recovery Conference in 2022.
So it has been said, “Many RPR activists only use the RPR ‘brand’ to boost their personal capital — to meet foreign diplomats, get media opportunities, get invited to international conferences, or win prestigious fellowships in the United States. For some, RPR is a ticket to power corridors, where they can make friends with government officials or politicians and maybe get elected to the Verkhovna Rada during the next election.”
At least when it comes to the field of “national memory reform,” this influential group of Ukrainian “civil society” leaders has been led by bonafide Banderites, and in particular by representatives of the “Center for Research of the Liberation Movement” (TsDVR), an OUN-B “facade structure” that has provided the RPR Coalition with most of its “experts” on national memory policy. No wonder then, for years, and as recently as June 30, 2023, the RPR Coalition has encouraged the government to create the Pantheon of Heroes. The final installment of this series will have to deal with the TsDVR, because this one (and the next) are about the RPR.
SubscribeThe ‘Civic Sector of Maidan’
 |
Readers probably already know about Right Sector, or Pravy Sektor, the notorious far-right group that formed in the early days of the “Euromaidan” protests in late 2013. Most will not have heard of Hromadske Sektor, or the “Civic Sector of Maidan.” This group also came together in the immediate aftermath of what political scientist Ivan Katchanovski described as “a highly publicized violent dispersal of a few hundred protesters by the anti-riot Berkut police” on the morning of November 30, 2013 in Kyiv. According to Katchanovski,
Videos, photos, and later admissions by Right Sector leaders and other Maidan protesters show that the Right Sector activists occupied at the time of the dispersal a part of the Maidan square near a monument to mythical Kyiv founders. Their analysis also shows that during the initial police dispersal of other protesters by force nearby Right Sector area-based protesters threw burning wood chunks and various other things at the Berkut police, which then beat other protesters on the Maidan square and surrounding streets... There is various evidence that the opposition leaders, including the far right ones, had advance information about this dispersal but did not inform the protesters in order to use this violent dispersal to greatly galvanize the mass protests, which were coming to the end on that night.
At the time, some liberals from the “Hromadske Sektor” wanted nothing to do with far-right extremists. The latter got more attention, but according to journalist Peter Pomerantsev, this other “sector” was one of the main groups in the “revolution.” By mid-December 2013, they had a website (euro-revolution.org) and newsletter (in English and Ukrainian). Allegedly, the network connected “more than 1000 people” and “initiated more than 30 peaceful demonstrations.”
Freedom House once credited the “Civic Sector of Euromaidan” as an entity that “made the encampment [on the Maidan, or Independence Square in Kyiv] a socially sustainable organism for many weeks.” According to a 2014 document produced for the body of the European Commission that is “responsible for the enlargement process” of the EU, the Hromadske Sektor was “instrumental in keeping the revolutionary process as less political as possible, and especially in terms of catalysing the energies and potential violence into non-violent protest.”
Far-right nationalists were not barred from this corner of the Euromaidan. Take for example Ihor Lutsenko, a coordinator of the “Civic Sector” who was abducted and beaten in January 2014, and later that year elected to Ukraine’s parliament at the top of the electoral list of the nationalistic “Fatherland” party. According to political scientists Kostiantyn Fedorenko and Andreas Umland, he “temporarily” fought with the neo-Nazi Azov battalion.
According to journalist Tetiana Kozak, Lutsenko hired a leader of the neo-Nazi organization C14, which is responsible for attacks on Roma and LGBT people in Ukraine, as one of his parliamentary aides. “The global right-wing renaissance is a revolution,” Lutsenko reportedlytold a far-right Christian “pro-family” conference some years later in Kyiv. “We know that there have been attacks on gay parades and inter-ethnic clashes, but this was because these were the only possible form of protest and expression of Ukraine’s conservative renaissance.”
Oleksandr Yabchanka was another coordinator of Hromadske Sektor. In 2014-18, he managed the RPR group for healthcare reform and became its top expert. Yabchanka also advised the Ministry of Healthcare from 2017-19, in which time the latter made him its spokesperson. Before the full-scale invasion, Yabchanka agreed to fight with “radical Maidan activists” from “Gonor,” a far-right group that splintered from the neo-Nazi Azov movement and formed a company in Dmytro Kotsiubailo’s “Da Vinci Wolves” battalion, which is affiliated with Right Sector.
The leadership of the Civic Sector also included more than a few Banderites from the Center for Research of the Liberation Movement, the aforementioned OUN-B “facade structure”: Volodymyr Viatrovych, his wife Yaryna Yasynevych, and their colleagues, Alina Shpak and Andriy Kohut. This group of nationalists have played a significant role in the “Banderization” of Ukraine.
The Kyiv Post once described the RPR Coalition as a “health care reform group,” because this was another area where it set the agenda. From 2016-19, the acting Healthcare Minister of Ukraine was Ulana Suprun, a member of OUN-B and friend of C14. “American-Born Doctor Takes on Ukraine’s Health Care System,” cheered the Atlantic Council, which warned Kyiv a few years later, “Any harassment of Suprun would more than raise eyebrows in Washington and Europe.”
 |
Package of Reforms and Reanimation of Bandera
In early 2014, the so-called Civic Sector of Maidan created the RPR Coalition. According to Chatham House, this was done “to sustain pressure on the country’s new leadership.” Whereas Viatrovych was appointed “memory czar” of post-Maidan Ukraine and Shpak served as his deputy, Kohut became the manager of national memory policy for the RPR Coalition (and later director of the SBU archives), and Yasynevych eventually joined the RPR board of directors.
Hanna Hopko, a hardline politician, “famous Ukrainian civil society activist,” and founding coordinator of the RPR Coalition, was another leader of Hromadske Sektor. Hopko’s Wikipedia page suggests that her activist background started with contributing to “various training programs for civil society activists in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Georgia, and Belarus.” From 2005 to 2007, she worked as a communications manager for a “USAID contractor.” Since 2014, she has proven herself to be an ally of Washington and what we call the “Bandera Lobby.”
 |
Foreign Policy magazine named Hopko as one of a hundred “leading global thinkers of 2014.” Also that year, she was elected to Ukrainian parliament, invited to participate in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service Leadership Seminar, and was one of three Ukrainian politicians honored with Democracy Awards by the US-funded National Democratic Institute (NDI).
In April 2014, Hopko gave US vice president Joe Biden a tour of the Maidan and St. Michael’s Cathedral in Kyiv. He recalled this months later while making the keynote speech at the NDI’s Annual Democracy Award Dinner, which had the theme, “From Protest to Politics: Honoring Ukraine’s New Democrats.” Biden proudly introduced Hopko as the newly elected “Madame Chair of the Rada Foreign Affairs Committee.”
In 2015, Hanna Hopko joined the steering board of the World Economic Forum’s “New Economic Vision for Ukraine.” Meanwhile, Ukraine adopted its controversial “decommunization laws,” and the RPR happily takes credit for all of them, which historian Tarik Cyril Amar tells us, “leave no room for either nationalism’s victims in the past or alternatives to nationalism in the present and future.” The bills may have been sponsored in parliament by a notorious far-right politician, but they were apparently drafted by the RPR’s “experts” on national memory policy with the Banderite “memory czar” of Ukraine.
 |
A couple years later, the USAID co-sponsored a “Shadow Report” by Anna Oliinyk about “Memory Policy Reform: Interim Results of the Enforcement of the ‘Decommunization Laws’.” Oliinyk, the acting director of the OUN-B’s Center for Research of the Liberation Movement (TsDVR), had succeeded Andriy Kohut as the national memory manager for the USAID-funded RPR Coalition.
Oliinyk presented her 2017 Shadow Report at a roundtable organized by a USAID-partnered think tank in cooperation with a parliamentary subcommittee on decommunization. This event was held “within the framework of the USAID RADA Program,” the stated goal of which is “to advance the next generation of reforms.” Banderites from the TsDVR, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINM), and the far-right Svoboda party participated.
Sitting next to the author of the Shadow Report was Lesya Bondaruk, a UINM employee who at least used to be a member of OUN-B and a paramilitary Banderite organization that launched the Right Sector in 2013. The roundtable was co-chaired by Volodymyr Viatrovych, deputy Svoboda leader Andrii Illienko, and the head of the USAID-partnered think tank. Ironically it was the latter who reportedly “emphasized that reform in the field of memory policy is one of the key humanitarian reforms that can change the fundamental ideological principles of Ukrainian society.”
 |
By 2018, the RPR drafted legislation co-sponsored by Hanna Hopko, deputy OUN-B leader Oleh Medunytsia, and other members of parliament that served to rehabilitate veterans of the OUN and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army. When Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko signed the law, they fulfilled one of the stated goals of the RPR Coalition: “Update the legislation on rehabilitation of victims of political repression.” Defending History, a website dedicated to combating Holocaust revisionism in Eastern Europe, noticed a statement from the UINM that “clearly indicates work on the law was funded by USAID under one of its projects in Ukraine.”
A year before Zelensky became President of Ukraine, the RPR Coalition published a 74-page “Roadmap of Reforms 2019-2023.” In it, the government was not only asked to “develop concepts of the national pantheon of heroes,” but also to secure the political independence of the UINM, and to “enshrine the national memory policy as an integral and obligatory element of state policy, such as economic, educational, security policy, etc.”
In March 2019, the RPR Coalition held a press conference to reflect on “5 Years of Reforms.” Two of the four speakers were Hanna Hopko and Volodymyr Viatrovych. Zelensky’s landslide election victory a month later presented a bump in the road and potentially a setback for the nationalists, who suspected him of being a pro-Russian tool of the Kremlin. Hence the need for “red lines.” Less than a week later, an OUN-B official promised a reporter from the United States, “We are going to raise a new Maidan revolution if he makes a single step away from our course.”
As “representatives of Ukrainian civil society,” the RPR Coalition drafted its “Toronto Principles” for the upcoming Ukraine Reform Conference that the Canadian government hosted in July 2019. The event featured a speech by the newly elected President Zelensky, and a conversation on stage between Hanna Hopko, the outgoing head of the committee on foreign affairs in Ukraine’s parliament, and Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland.
Less than a year later, Hopko participated in nation-wide protests against Zelensky that included some extremely threatening messaging and were held by the far-right “Capitulation Resistance Movement” — an organization led by Banderites and powered by neo-Nazis. Hopko echoed one of their slogans on Twitter: “Year of Zelensky - year of [pro-Russian] revanche.” The Bandera Lobby Blog has already detailed Hopko’s involvement in the origins of this far-right “Resistance Movement.”
 |
The RPR Coalition’s “experts” from the Banderite TsDVR negatively evaluated the Ukrainian government’s progress on national memory reform in 2020. Some of their priorities were “left without any attention,” including the “creation of the National Pantheon of Heroes and development of a framework document that would enable institutional independence of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory.”
The next Ukraine Reform Conference ended with a panel discussion on national memory. “I can tell you that the current government program ignores the issues of national memory,” complained Yaryna Yasynevych, an RPR Coalition board member in those days, and Banderite former coordinator of Hromadske Sektor, who is married to Volodymyr Viatrovych.
In 2021, the Banderite RPR memory warriors concluded that their nationalist agenda was “once again outside of the state’s attention.” They reiterated that Kyiv should “develop a concept and hold public consultations on the creation of a National Pantheon of Heroes.”
‘The Time Has Come’
Later that year, as Washington warned Kyiv about a Russian invasion, and days after Zelensky announced an alleged coup plot again himself, the Ukrainian president decreed Dmytro Kotsiubailo of Right Sector a “Hero of Ukraine.” Fifteen months later, he was killed in Bakhmut. Kotsiubailo not only received a high-profile “hero’s funeral” in Kyiv, but he became the third person in the history of independent Ukraine to be buried at Askold’s Grave park, which was once a cemetery.
 |
Days after the funeral, Kotsiubailo’s fiancée Alina Mykhailova declared, “THE PANTHEON OF HEROES. I truly believe that the time has come… Here must be prominent figures of the past looking at us from the sky: Ivan Mazepa, Stepan Bandera, Andriy Melnyk, Yevhen Konovalets, Symon Petliura, Pavlo Skoropadsky and many more.” She submitted her petition to Zelensky. The Military Media Center at the Defense Ministry of Ukraine hosted a round table about the proposal once it received the 25,000 signatures required to get a response from the Ukrainian president.
Speakers included OUN-M leader Bohdan Chervak, the first deputy chair of the State Committee of Television and Radio Broadcasting, which helped the information agency of the Ministry of Defense organize the event; OUN-B member(s) Leontiy Shypilov and Stepan Bratsiun¹; and at least two people associated with the far-right Kholodny Yar Historical Club, which is partnered with a neo-Nazi publisher and former editor in chief of the Azov battalion newspaper, “Black Sun.” One of those people is Andriy Kovalev—spokesman of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, “active participant in decommunization” (according to his Ukrainian Wikipedia page), and board member of the Heroyika Charitable Foundation. The latter is chaired by Pavlo Podobed, the OUN-B member who wrote the “National Pantheon” page on the website of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory.
A written response from Zelensky arrived in the next ten days after the round table, and said that a memorial for Ukrainian heroes was already underway. Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, a member of parliament since 2019, deputy chair of the “Holos” party, and former “advocacy manager” of the RPR Coalition (2014-16)—in addition to a founding member of the OUN-B’s Youth Nationalist Congress!—helped Mykhailova to clarify that this was referring to a separate project that stalled. Yurchyshyn wrote to the Minister of Culture and Information Policy, whose response disappointed the nationalists, because he conflated the Pantheon of Heroes with plans for a National Military Memorial Cemetery in Kyiv, and said the project should not glorify individuals but virtues.
This “misunderstanding” would not get in the way, assured Alina Mykhailova. Two months later, in a lengthy speech to Ukraine’s parliament on Constitution Day, Volodymyr Zelensky announced his support for establishing “the Pantheon of Heroes and the National Military Cemetery” and “the reburial of all our heroes buried abroad in Ukraine.” Two days later, the RPR Coalition reiterated that these sites are part of its USAID-funded “Vision of Ukraine 2030.” In July, the Minister of Culture and Information Policy said that he has consulted Western colleagues on the Pantheon of Heroes and other memorials. He emphasized that “they always start with the phrase, ‘do not repeat Soviet monuments.’”
The next installment of this series will explore the relationship between the RPR Coalition, “patriotic education” in Ukraine, and the Bandera cult’s indoctrination of youth.
Thanks for reading Bandera Lobby Blog! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
More about OUN-B member Leontiy Shypilov coming soon on the Bandera Lobby Blog. Bratsiun is the leader of the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, a far-right political party established by OUN-B in the 1990s, which may have been autonomous since the early 21st century. Bratsiun, however, appears to be an OUN-B member. In late 2018, he formed a tripartite “Leadership of Ukrainian Nationalists” with Bohdan Chervak (OUN-M) and the head of the paramilitary Banderite group that launched Right Sector.
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten