(This extract takes 2¼ minutes to read, but Robeson’s post itself can take two dozen.)
Zarnitsa was the war game of the Soviet Young Pioneers, essentially a militaristic “capture the flag.” The OUN-B’s Youth Nationalist Congress has its own hardcore capture the flag event (dedicated to the 1940s Ukrainian Insurgent Army), “the most popular patriotic field game” in the country. The “pro-Russian” Yanukovych government (2010-14) supported a Zarnitsa revival in Ukraine, possibly to counter the Banderites. At that point, Dzhura was confined to western Ukraine, but after 2014 it spread across the country. In 2023, “Zarnitsa 2.0” launched in Russia, spearheaded by the sanctioned “Yunarmiya.” Forgive me for quoting the BBC:
The biggest and most powerful Russian organisation involved with children is Yunarmia (Youth Army). Affiliated with the Russian defence ministry, it accepts members as young as eight. It operates across all of Russia, and now has branches in occupied areas of Ukraine. “We’re providing children with some basic skills which they’ll find useful should they decide to join military service,” says Fidail Bikbulatov, who runs Yunarmia’s section in occupied areas of the Zaporizhzhia region in south-east Ukraine.
[…]
The EU has sanctioned Yunarmia, and Bikbulatov personally, for “the militarisation of Ukrainian children”. Yunarmia is also targeted by UK sanctions for being part of Russia’s campaign of “brainwashing” Ukrainian children.
“What they [the Russians] have achieved is that all our [Ukrainian] children will be nationalists,” according to the First Lady Olena Zelenska. The neo-Nazi leader of the Azov movement’s new “Veteran Corps” has suggested that their paramilitary youth group “Centuria” aspires to be the Yunarmiya of Ukraine. (It calls itself an “Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.”) The Azov movement has its own history with Dzhura. This is all something I’ve struggled to write about, and not only because I lost almost all my notes from last year. I’m not sure if this will be interesting to read (hence no paywall), but it is a missing piece in the “Bandera Lobby” puzzle.
In 2001, the OUN-B founded the Stepan Bandera National Revival Center (SBNRC) and the far-right Youth Nationalist Congress. It also had a new leader, Andriy Haidamakha from Belgium. In the 1990s, he led the new Kyiv bureau of Radio Svoboda, the Ukrainian language service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which the CIA set up in the Cold War.
As Haidamakha rose to power in the OUN-B, it established the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations in Washington. Paul Wolfowitz and Zbigniew Brzezinski were among the speakers at its inaugural conference in 2000, sponsored by the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, both part of the U.S. government’s (CIA-adjacent) “democracy promotion” apparatus.
As the deputy head of OUN-B, Ivan Havdyda from Ternopil (western Ukraine) was responsible for its youth sector and directed the SBNRC. He’s remembered as the “godfather” of the Youth Nationalist Congress (MNK, Molodizhnyy Natsionalistychnyy Konhres). In 2003, Havdyda suddenly died, and the MNK held its first “Gurby-Antonivtsi” game, which is dedicated to the 1944 Battle of Gurby, the largest clash between Soviet forces and the OUN-B’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
