Ceasefire as a 'disgrace.' Conference of Ukrainian nationalists and fascists convenes with the support of the Zelensky government.
Stepan Bandera Monument, Lviv, Ukraine
By Susann Witt-Stahl, Junge Welt, 7 Feb. 2025. Excerpts translated from the German by Helmut-Harry Loewen.
The “XII Bandera Readings,” featuring ultra-right-wing academics, politicians and activists from Ukraine and other Eastern European countries, began on Friday, 7 February, in Kiev. … The “Bandera Readings” have been held on the anniversaries of the founding congress of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (28 Jan. - 3 Feb. 1929) since 2014. The first event took place during the “Revolution of Dignity.” A highlight this year is likely to be the speech by Oleg Medunitsya, international leader of its Bandera wing (OUN-B), who is also chairman of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), which has been reconstituted in recent years [as the Anti-Imperialist Bloc of Nations]. During the Cold War, the ABN was the largest association of Hitler collaborators worldwide. Many of the participants in the “Bandera Readings” in 2025, including historians, military officers and the chaplain of the Banderist Right Sector, are lecturers at the “University of the Free Nations,” which was established in 2023 on the initiative of the OUN-B and the ABN. Some appear as “heads” of Russia's “enslaved nations” united in the ABN.
The organizer is the Ukrainian Center for Strategic Studies (USSD), a Banderist think tank headed by Yuri Sirotyuk, deputy leader of the fascist Svoboda party. Sirotjuk recently warned against a “shameful ceasefire.” Vladimir Tilishchak, deputy head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, which reports to President Volodimir Zelensky's cabinet of ministers, is also a member of the USSD's academic staff. …
The annual rendezvous of the political heirs of the ideologues and pioneers of the OUN-B, its paramilitary arm the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and the Ukrainian Waffen SS has also always taken place in state institutions, such as the Research Institute for Ukrainian Studies and, since 2021, the Maidan Museum, which is sponsored by the director of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and is a cooperation partner of the Goethe-Institut.
Although antipathy towards liberal democracy is on full display - for example, the title of the "IX Bandera Readings" was ”How to complete the Ukrainian national revolution" -, 2024 was also the first time that a representative of a Western non-governmental organization was involved. Janusz Bugajski, former advisor to the US Agency for International Development (USAID), works for the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, a CIA-affiliated neocon think tank that was opened in 1984 under President Ronald Reagan. OUN-B and Co., which had been supported by British and US intelligence services and the Gehlen Organization (forerunner of the German Federal Intelligence Service - BND) from the mid-1940s, have long since proved useful to NATO hardliners again, especially when it comes to further escalating the war against the arch-enemy.
The fact that the “Bandera Readings” also serve Ukrainian fascists as a stage for muscle-flexing, self-promotion and PR as legionnaires in the fight to stabilize the unipolar world order was made clear in a speech given by the leader of the neo-Nazi gang “C-14,” Yevhen Karas, at the ninth conference on 5 February 2022. Less than three weeks before the start of the Russian invasion, he praised the nationalists as the “standard-bearers” of Ukraine, who had unleashed a war the likes of which had not been seen for decades, and boasted about huge arms supplies from the USA and the UK. “We are fulfilling the tasks of the West because we are the only ones willing to do so, because we enjoy killing.” Karas continued: “This is about new political alliances on a global level.”
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