I meant to post this for Captive Nations Week, but unfortunately the pressure on me to write something up is not as intense as the oppression felt by millions still behind the iron curtain. Today’s subject is the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN). Motto: Freedom for nations and for the individual. Goal: collapse the USSR. Cadre: the OUN-Bandera. Leader: Yaroslav Stetsko.

Yaroslav Stetsko (b. Galicia 1912 - d. Munich 1986), an important Banderite ideologue, served as the deputy head of the “political-ideological apparatus” of the OUN leadership in Galicia. In 1938, the OUN’s Canadian newspaper published a viciously antisemitic article by Stetsko. According to Orest T. Martynowych, the historian who uncovered this, Stetsko “insisted that Jews were ‘nomads and parasites’” and exulted in the Ukrainians as “the first people in Europe to understand the corrupting work of Jewry.” Martynowych says that this same article “placed Jews at the center of an international conspiracy by suggesting that Jewish capitalists and Jewish Communists were collaborating to promote Jewish interests.”

During the 1936 trial of OUN members in Lviv, Rossolinski-Liebe writes that Polish officials removed Stetsko from the courtroom and “punished [him] with twenty-four hours [of solitary confinement] in a darkroom” for making a fascist salute. Ten years later, Stetsko became the leader of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), which Scott and Jon Lee Anderson have described as the “largest and most important umbrella for former Nazi collaborators in the world.” In 1983, Stetsko received an invitation to the White House, in part to celebrate the ABN’s 40th anniversary, where he shook hands with President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush.

- Eagle, Trident, Swastika by Bandera Lobby

This phrenologically interesting individual, Yaroslav Semenovych Stetsko, noted for Nazi collaboration and supporting the Holocaust, is still honored by the Ukrainian government and an ABN successor group. We’ll discuss that group later.

Based on research by Stephan Dorril in MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations,¹ it can be quickly summarized that “[from] 1946–1947, with Anglo-American support, the OUN-B’s secret police, the Sluzhba Bezpeky, conducted Operation Ohio, an assassination campaign in displaced persons camps in western Germany. The victims were suspected Soviet agents, members of rival Ukrainian groups, and those who knew too much about the collaborationist background of the ABN’s leaders.”

Quoting from Operation Ohio: U.S. Intelligence & OUN-Bandera’s Secret Assassination Campaign

Horrifically, with the alleged connivance of the CIC or other American intelligence agencies, the OUN killers, using “techniques borrowed from the Nazis,” burned the bodies of those they killed “in large bread baking ovens…. the very same ovens used to bake the bread for the hungry residents of the camp”

As already mentioned above, an eyewitness to the events at Mittenwald told Cakars and Osborn “that American soldiers — probably intelligence officers under the cover of ordinary soldiers — held the keys to the Mittenwald bread/body ovens. The OUN-B killers had to coordinate somehow with U.S. intelligence in order to get rid of the bodies of their victims.

We should note that the primary source being cited for allegations of US intelligence involvement and the shocking Auschwitz-style incinerations is WIN Magazine, an outlet of the War Resister’s League. Unfortunately, proper investigations into these activities are limited. Their assertion of the OUN’s long history of murder, going back to the extermination of Jews during the German occupation, however, is undeniable. That the killings may have continued under American sponsorship as an anti-Soviet ‘resistance’ group should not be dismissed out of hand.

Another friendly Ukrainian is Matvieyko:

Myron Matvieyko joined the OUN as early as 1930. At some point during World War II, he became an Abwehr agent and allegedly led the SB in German-occupied Lviv. Mykola Lebed, who founded the SB, speculated that the Soviets doubled Matvieyko during the war. According to Lebed, perhaps in 1942, “Matvieyko was trained as an agent by the Germans and dispatched behind Soviet lines. He disappeared for around a year, and then in 1943 showed up timidly and scared in Lvov [i.e. Lviv], allegedly escaping and breaking through the Soviet lines.”

In any case, Matvieyko “exerted tremendous influence” on Bandera after the war. It was also said in those days that he “usually wears [a] suit out of American army material and a brown felt hat.” From 1946-49, he not only led the SB in Germany, but also directed the “Homeland Contacts Section” of ZCH/OUN. During this time, according to a 1950 memo by the head of the CIA’s Munich Operations Base,

[Matvieyko] “masterminded” all courier missions mounted by the OUN/Bandera, all debriefings and liquidations of suspected Soviet agents, counterfeiting of documents, contacts by SB members with American intelligence agencies including CIC [Counter-Intelligence Corps], MIS [Military Intelligence Service], ODEUM [Gehlen Organization], G-2 EUCOM [U.S. European Command intelligence], ONI [Office of Naval Intelligence], and ourselves, and OUN/B attempts to penetrate other Ukrainian emigrant organizations. Along with Yaroslav STETZKO, subject [Matvieyko] exerted tremendous influence on the policy and thinking of Stefan BANDERA. … Every courier he managed from 1946 on misfired: either the couriers never arrived in the Ukraine, or in the case of Yaroslav MOROZ (SLAVKO) … the courier ran right into the hands of the RIS [Russian Intelligence Service] and was sent back doubled to Germany. …

The case officer, indeed, knows of no contact that any American intelligence service had with SB OUN/Bandera which did not end with complete disillusionment during MATVIEYKO’s regime. … The case officer is positive that any one who takes operational contact with OUN/B and tries to mount operations into the Ukraine will get their fingers burned, this and nothing more. … The case officer is convinced in his own mind that we do not want to deal with the OUN/B on any basis for the present because they are a penetrated and insecure group. … The case officer will argue this stand with all comers.

They didn’t properly cite it, but that’s from a real declassified CIA document. At this point, we should note the whole Gehlen Org thing. ODEUM is a codename for it. Written out right there is the connection between Ukrainian fascists, German fascists, and half a dozen American intelligence agencies. What we’re left with is a bunch of loose threads. We can talk about the connections between this stuff and the Reagan Revolution, as described by Russ Bellant in Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party. We could talk about the living legacy of intelligence ops in the Ukrainian-American and Ukrainian-Canadian communities, right up to the Yaroslav Hunka ‘scandal.’ Here is a quick case study.

One of the ABN’s successors is the Anti-imperial Bloc of Nations. Their mission is “national revolutions of enslaved nations.” No, they are not Maoists. They post a lot of articles about Ukrainian nationalism, uphold Yaroslav Stetsko thought, and promote Ukraine hawkery. They at least have the domain for ABN.ua, which is something. Overall, they demonstrate how attempts to “collapse the Soviet Union” by Nazi war criminals have morphed into attempts to “collapse the Russian Federation” by neocons.

This is in no way comprehensive. There’s nothing comprehensive on this topic. I just hope to outline some of the disturbing connections that better contextualize the United States’ history in Ukraine. Please read the articles by Bandera Lobby, Jeffrey S. Kaye, etc., if you would like the long story. Hopefully there will come a full account of all this, but it will take a lot of declassification, and the OUN, formed 97 years ago, certainly isn’t done.

¹ The WiKKKipedia page for this book has only one subheader, “Inaccuracies and Criticism.” Nobody even bothered to add a summary. I don’t feel like evaluating the quality of an entire book: the errors they point out are limited and insubstantial, and are being weaponized by bourgeois papers with intelligence connections.