— Mr. Oleh, at the end of 2022, the XV Great Congress of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Bandera movement) was held in Ukraine. You were unanimously elected the Head of the Organization. How did it happen?
— During the Grand Meeting of the OUN, almost all decisions are made unanimously. This is not because we do not have intra-organizational democracy, but before making decisions, we usually agree on them in advance. The decision of the previous Congress was that the candidate for the post of Head would be a representative from Ukraine. Until that time, the heads of the OUN were citizens of other states, with the exception of Slava Stetsko, who was a deputy of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. We have a certain committee that looks at different candidates, communicates with them and makes proposals. When this nomination commission asked me if I agreed to be the Head, at first I refused, because I believed that I did not have enough merit in front of such an authoritative Organization. But before the Meeting, the commission asked me a second time, then I agreed. It became a challenge for me, opening a new page in my life.
– Were you a member of the OUN before that?
– Yes, of course. I have been a member of the OUN since 1998.
— You were twice elected a People’s Deputy of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. And how did you become a Bandera follower?
– I have always been from Bandera as long as I can remember. Even before the restoration of Ukrainian Independence, in 1990, together with like-minded people, we created the Association of Independent Ukrainian Youth of Sumy region, and declared ourselves supporters of Ukrainian nationalism. After 1991, our Bandera environment organically joined the OUN.
You can’t just come to our organization and write an application for admission. The people of Bandera themselves come to one or another person and offer to become a member of their Organization. We are not a political party. The Ukrainian State is the highest value for us. And we are an organization with values. Our values and our people are our main resource.
— One of the main areas of your activity as the Head of the OUN (b) is the restoration of the Defense Fund of Ukraine, which was created in 1973, on the initiative of Yaroslav Stetsko.
— This Fund was created to accumulate resources for the liberation of Ukraine, it was located outside Ukraine. When the war started, the Fund was “unfrozen” and we quickly began to spend money on what was needed for the defense of Ukraine, which is exactly what this Fund was intended for. At the Great Congress we decided that this Fund must be replenished because we do not know how long this war will last. Actually, after that, the management of the Fund was appointed and this Fund began not only to spend, but also to collect funds again.
— Mr. Oleh, how did our predecessors, who founded this Foundation 50 years ago, have a vision that the Moscovites would attack us again?
— Ukrainian nationalists have always understood that freedom is not given to anyone just like that, and the Ukrainian nation will have to pay a high price for us to be able to live in our state. Of course, no one could have predicted the GKChP and the rapid collapse of the Soviet Union, which occurred in August 1991. But we also predicted that there would be a new round of struggle against our arch-enemy, Moscow, which encroached on our identity. We had absolutely no doubts that this time would come. We have always consistently criticized any government that took pro-Russian steps in Ukraine. We have always raised the slogan “Kyiv against Moscow!” on the banner of our struggle.
We created the Anti-Bolshevik Block of Nations and were promoters in this process. They united enslaved nations around themselves. Therefore, the number one task today is to preserve statehood. Because we understand that if we have a Ukrainian state, then we will have our own army and government. And these are the mechanisms that can protect the Ukrainian nation from destruction. There will be a state of its own – there will be no Holodomor, there will be no destruction, as they tried to destroy us in Buch, Gostomel and Irpen, totally. There will be no genocide.
— In 1991, did you have the feeling that freedom was given to us too easily?
— I was only 19 at the time, but of course there was a feeling. We were already preparing ourselves for the fight. At that time, the Sumy were completely Russian-speaking, there was not a single Ukrainian kindergarten or school. And then a group of people appears who speak Ukrainian, telling us that we need a free Ukrainian State, that everything must be translated into Ukrainian, that our young men should not be allowed to serve in the Soviet army – they looked at us like aliens. But there were more and more of these “aliens” in Sumy… We held meetings in schools and universities, went to people, to all events, engaged in propaganda from house to house, from audience to audience. They published their own newspaper, established their first website in Sumy and spread their point of view via the Internet. And, in the end, this work turned out to be effective. In Sumy, it was possible to defeat the “Russian peace”, and when in 2014 it reached such an active stage of the hybrid war, all cells of the “Russian peace” in Sumy were suppressed. We became a mainstream environment, we became successful because we were personally successful and professional: some in politics, some in business, some in social sciences. And because of this, we formed an environment that is not even connected to any political force, but an environment of people who are connected ideologically and by values.
— Recently, you had a number of important meetings in the USA, in particular in New York. Tell me, are the allies doing enough for our victory in the war with Muscovy?
– In my opinion, not enough. I would not like to criticize the American government, but I will say what I said before: the Russians are fighting us with all their might. We are fighting with the Russians only with what we had – these are Soviet weapons, only with what we created, and we created a lot, in particular during the last year of the war. I think that if we talk about the issue of aerial reconnaissance, strike drones, no one in the world does as much in this area as Ukraine does, even those samples of American weapons that were handed over to us. They are such small Switchblade drones, the kamikaze is a nice weapon, but it costs thousands of dollars. Therefore, of course, we need powerful weapons to recapture our territories, in order to go on the counter-offensive and recapture everything, to return to the borders of 1991.
– Do not take it as a provocative question: Were we preparing for war at all?
– We did not properly prepare for the war. How can you prepare for war and remove troops from Kyiv? How could the Russians be allowed to pass through the Antoniv bridge? How could it not be blown up? How could they be allowed on the Kherson side of the Dnieper? The same applies to the Kakhovskaya HPP dam. How could there be no military in my native Sumy? A city of 300,000 people, a region of a million people, no military. In the morning before noon, everyone who was supposed to defend the city left. The Russians drove along the central street, they stopped at traffic lights, let traffic pass, they drove as if in a parade.
— Was it an instruction from Kyiv, or was it sabotage on the ground?
— The authorities simply did not do what they had to do, did not fulfill their function. The government must defend the country, it must predict that there is a threat, that it is necessary to form the Territorial Defense, that it is necessary to give it weapons. And this process started only when the war started, weapons were thrown from KamAZs, I saw it with my own eyes. Thank God that they gave weapons, because in some cities they did not and this led to the loss of territory.
– That is, we were not ready, but our enemies?
— Russia has been preparing for this war for a long time. They built Russia Today, which works with 8 or 9 editorial offices in different languages. They bribed politicians, and in Germany almost all politicians. Where the Russians have the greatest influence, for example, in Hungary, a hostile policy is actually being conducted against our country. And I know for sure that if the Russians had succeeded in the war, the Hungarians would have hit us in the back. They would enter Transcarpathia. They were mentally prepared for it. They would apologize to their NATO allies and say that something is in danger for our Hungarians, our compatriots. This would be a repeat of 1939, when they destroyed Carpathian Ukraine. But this didn’t happen because of the resilience of our soldiers, because of TrO, because of partisans, because of the Armed Forces, a lot of factors and the help of allies.
We have demonstrative examples of such a hybrid creeping imperial policy of the Kremlin in the post-Soviet space. For example, the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh is a conflict that was created by the KGB. They deliberately played the card of Nagorno-Karabakh, which was territorially isolated from Armenia, fueled separatism there in order to later create a conflict and become “peacemakers”, and later tell Azerbaijan what to do, what to Armenians. And so it went for some time, until the Azerbaijanis, thank God, took the initiative and with the support of Turkey, Israel and Ukraine, which has always supported the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, inflicted a military defeat on the Armenians and now actually control the entire territory of their country. The same thing happened in Georgia, the conflict in Abkhazia. They tried to provoke a conflict in Adjara, in South Ossetia, Gagauzia or Transnistria in Moldova. There were even local border conflicts with Kazakhstan, in the Caspian Sea. If they succeeded in Ukraine, I think the first threat would be Moldova and Kazakhstan. Because there are a large number of so-called “Russian-speaking” people in Kazakhstan, and among them, unfortunately, there are also Ukrainians. And these are territories in the north of Kazakhstan, and Kazakhs understand this threat. And the majority of Kazakhs, by the way, are on our Ukrainian side.
— Is such a scenario of the end of the war possible, when Russia disintegrates from within?
– Here the issue is not even the end of the war. Any war ends sooner or later. But the question is what’s next after this war. If Russia remains and Putin is replaced by some Khodorkovsky conditional or Navalny, then where is the guarantee that after them some new dead moth will not appear, like Putin, a gray mouse, and then, after 20 years, using economic resources, exploiting the population , the resources of the nations enslaved by Russia will not go to fight anyone again. Where is the warranty? We have already seen some guarantees in the Budapest memorandum.
– How do you see our victory?
— I see our victory in the disintegration of the Moscow state within the current borders and the emergence of new states of free peoples on this territory. We are against the preservation of the Moscow empire in any form: Putin’s, Prigozhin’s or liberal. The time has come for the revival of the ABN, as the Anti-Imperial Block of Nations. At one time, ABN helped to collapse the USSR, now ABN faces a new task – to shake and divide Putin’s Russia!
Vasyl Tretyak
Український погляд
