This is the true story of the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement in its form today, bought and paid for by the US Central Intelligence Agency.
Cynthia Chung has published chapter 5 from her newly released book ‘The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set: the Birth of International Fascism and Anglo-American Foreign Policy’ on Substack.
The chapter details how the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement post-WWII was bought and paid for by the Central Intelligence Agency (“CIA”).
She begins by outlining a few important historical highlights – the historical roots of Ukrainian Nationalism. Beginning with the Kievan Rus’, a federation in Eastern-Northern Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century. Today’s Belarus, Russia and Ukraine all recognise the people of Kievan Rus’ as their cultural ancestors. She continues to outline the history through to the founding of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in 1929 in a place which was, at the time, located in Poland.
The OUN assassinated Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Pieracki in 1934. Among those tried and convicted in 1936 for Pieracki’s murder, were OUN’s Stefan Bandera and Mykola Lebed. Both escaped when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. In August 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the non-aggression pact, dividing Poland. In 1940 the OUN would split into the OUN-M led by Andriy Melnyk, and OUN-B headed by Stefan Bandera.
In June 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded western Ukraine, there were many western Ukrainians who welcomed the invading Nazis as their “liberators.” Both the OUN-M and OUN-B would spend much of the war collaborating closely with the Germans.
Eight days after Germany’s invasion of the USSR, on 30 June 1941, OUN-B proclaimed the establishment of the Ukrainian State in the name of Bandera in Lviv and pledged loyalty to Hitler. In response, the OUN-B leaders and associates were arrested and imprisoned or killed outright by the Gestapo. Stefan Bandera and his closest deputy Jaroslav Stetsko were initially kept under house arrest and then sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Mykola Lebed was able to slip through the German police net and became the de facto leader of the OUN-B leadership, also known as the Banderists.
The following year Lebed would become the leader of the underground terror wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which continued in function until 1956. By September 1944 German Army officers in northern Ukraine told their superiors in Foreign Armies East that the UPA was a “natural ally of Germany” and “a valuable aid for the German High Command,” and Himmler himself authorised intensified contacts with UPA.
Also in September 1944, the Germans released Bandera and Stetsko from Sachsenhausen.
This leads into second half of Chung’s chapter 5, see below. You can read the full chapter, with references to sources included, HERE.
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