Ukrainian ultranationalist lobby flaunts influence over Biden, blocks top Russia expert’s appointment
By Moss Robeson
Demonstrating the power the ultranationalist Ukraine lobby has attained in Biden’s Washington, the White House has withdrawn consideration of esteemed Russia specialist Matthew Rojansky
Matthew Rojansky is the head of the Kennan Institute, a notable think tank at the US government-funded Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. Despite his well-established expertise on Russia and lengthy record of leadership on the issue, he has been judged “too soft” to work in the Biden White House.
An increasingly influential element within Washington’s powerful anti-Russian lobby is taking a victory lap after Politico credited it for helping to block Rojanksy’s appointment to Russia director at the National Security Council. It is the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), an organization with close ties to the extremist Banderite movement.
The UCCA made its opposition to Rojansky known in the form of an “emphatic request” to President Joseph Biden, accusing the veteran Russia hand of making unspecified “incendiary comments over the years” which supposedly indicated that “Ukraine is expendable to secure closer U.S.-Russia relations.”
Meanwhile, the Chicago-based leadership of the Illinois Division of the UCCA fired off indignant letters of protest to President Biden and Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), co-chair of the Senate Ukraine Caucus, which was founded in 2015 on the initiative of the UCCA.
The Chicago leaders objected to Rojansky’s seemingly benign observation that “peaceful coexistence [with Russia] remains an imperative,” likening the statement to “appeasement.” They also baselessly suggested that Rojansky might be “influenced because of overt or covert financial support from Russia.”
As the director of the Kennan Institute since 2013, Rojansky is far from the pro-Kremlin boogeyman he’s been made out to be by his most rabid antagonists. If anything, he represents the legacy of the man his employer is named for: George Kennan, the architect of the post-war US policy of containing the Soviet Union. But in a Biden administration dominated by anti-Russia hardliners, it appears even Kennan –– who criticized NATO’s eastward expansion after the Soviet Union’s collapse as a “fateful error” –– would be unwelcome.
The Banderites take over the UCCA
It is also no secret that the UCCA has for decades been led by cult-like followers of the late Ukrainian fascist Stepan Bandera, a Nazi collaborator whose devotees carried out numerous genocidal pogroms against his country’s Jewish population.
Bandera’s “Revolutionary” faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B a.k.a. OUN-R) participated in the Nazi “Holocaust by Bullets” in western Ukraine. Since then, it has hijacked the organized Ukrainian diaspora, and cozied up to much of the US foreign policy establishment, not to mention the far-right in Ukraine.
In 1980, a coordinating body of OUN-B “facade structures” formerly known as the “Ukrainian Liberation Front” staged a divisive coup in the UCCA, from which the organization has never fully recovered.
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| 1980 convention of the UCCA (Ukrainian Weekly, October 19, 1980) |
The Banderites continue to play a leading role in the UCCA under the umbrella of the U.S. Division of the so-called “International Council in Support of Ukraine,” the successor of the “Liberation Front,” which relocated its headquarters from New York to Toronto in 2013. (The GrayZone previously reported on the Canadian Division’s ties to the Conservative Party of Canada.)
Days before he passed away in August 2019, Jaroslaw Fedun, a 45-year member of the UCCA and the chairman of its audit committee, filed a complaint with the New York State Charities Bureau about the “egregious improprieties” of the UCCA.
A self-described “son of pioneers” of the Ukrainian community in New York City received Fedun’s complaint just before he died and submitted it on his behalf.
In a second complaint to the Charities Bureau dated September 28, 2019, Fedun’s anonymous confidant further alleged in a sensational manifesto that “most of [the] UCCA Board members and all of its employees are OUN(R) members.” He described the Banderites as a “group of individuals with a hidden extremist agenda.”
Throughout the Cold War, the UCCA waged war on Kennan’s containment strategy, condemning it as a form of appeasement while advocating a policy of rollback that could have resulted in all-out war.
“The collapse of Kennanism in this country is a good sign,” Lev Dobriansky, a former president of the UCCA and co-founder of the right-wing Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, once remarked. Dobriansky was a close ally of Yaroslav Stetsko, a notorious Nazi collaborator who succeeded Bandera as leader of the OUN-B.
In the 1960s, Dobriansky and other UCCA leaders even lambasted a rival OUN faction that had been backed by the CIA as too soft on communism. Despite its history of extremism, the UCCA has apparently attained considerable influence over the Biden administration, while realists like Rojansky have been effectively blacklisted.
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