I’ll be honest with you. I’m not a great writer. Nope, I gave that up a long time ago, when a very good friend and fellow creative who I respect told me, rather plainly in my early adult years, that I was a much better graphic artist than a writer. It stuck, and I gave up the practice for quite some time so I wouldn’t embarrass myself. But being a geopolitical junkie as I am, I’ve found some very disturbing links in the past couple of years that I’ve been researching the conflict in Ukraine which I feel I should share with the American public, whether it gets traction or not. It’s been a rabbit hole that keeps twisting and turning, and the more I’ve learned - the more concerning it’s been. I could probably research it for another decade and not find all the connections. So, I’ve made a conscious decision to cut it off where it stands and write this article. Feel free to use the information I present, build upon it, or contact me if you have any valuable insight yourself. I will make the article free of charge, but I do ask - as I’m a disabled guy with not many resources - if you feel it’s worth supporting, please consider a paid subscription & it’ll give me much more time and leeway to sharpen my writing and share further valuable information on Ukraine and other topics. I’m going to present it in three digestible parts. First, explaining how I fell into the rabbit hole in the first place, learning about a small town in Wisconsin and some very disturbing, recurring racist/nazi incidents, and then how that research has expanded to reveal a 75-year partnership with Ukrainian nazi collaborators, prominent American politicians, the Democratic Party, and connections to billions in Ukraine aid that our government has passed just since 2022.

Part I: Nazitown, USA

Now, I’ve got no connections to Russia or Ukraine, but I became curious about the situation there since 2013. Followed it, again, just out of curiosity since. And one day, a couple years ago, I stumbled across an article in the Wisconsin Examiner that started this whole affair. Long story short, it was about the Ukrainian Youth Association summer camp in the small town of Baraboo, Wisconsin. Just on the surface, a camp devoted to the culture of a foreign state wouldn’t be such a concern, but the headline itself “Ukrainian Association in Baraboo honors nazi collaborators with statues at children’s summer camp” - well - that was worth delving into, I thought. You see, Baraboo - a small town with a population of around 12,000 and a 88% white population, nestled on the Canadian/American border - It’s got problems. And by problems, I mean, a suspiciously repetitive pattern of racist incidents over the past decade. You may remember a very widely-disseminated national story from 2018 where a group of schoolchildren took a prom photo with many of the students pictured doing a nazi salute. It provoked a lot of outrage at the time, but was quickly forgotten, and excused mainly as students performing the salute as a very unfunny joke. School officials said they investigated, but never took any action. But, curious as I am, I decided to dig further into it and found very many such racist incidents happening in such a small town, incidents in the city and nearby areas where nazi flyers have been distributed in sandwich bags, weighted down with birdseed and thrown into people’s yards (with no culprit ever caught in subsequent investigations). Then, an incident in 2018 where a video was posted on Youtube where local LGBT and Jewish teachers in the school district were mocked and slurred, and subsequently taken down.

And it goes on, and on, and on, to the point that listing all such incidents I found examples of in the past two decades would be too exhaustive. In 2012, a convoy of teenagers drove around Baraboo in trucks, each flying Confederate battle flags, in an effort to memorialize a student killed in a car accident. In 2020, there was a federal lawsuit filed against the school district where a black student, Dasia Banks, alleged that school officials would openly allow slurs to be used against her faced constant harassment since 1st grade. The lawsuit was settled out of court. In another incident in 2024, a school superintendent, Rainey Briggs, filed a restraining order against a white parent who jumped onstage at a graduation ceremony to shove Briggs (who is black) away from a handshake with his daughter, telling Briggs that he did not want him touching her. Seeing a pattern? I did. And that a Ukrainian Youth Camp was in the area with statues glorifying Ukrainian nazi collaborators, I decided to dig into that and will describe what that led to in part II:

Part II: The Camps

For anyone who has followed the conflict in Ukraine, even mildly, you have surely seen allegations hurled at groups such as Azov adopting nazi symbols, performing torchlight parades, ceremonies, etc. openly. You may dismiss them, but for someone who is well-versed in the conflict, you shouldn’t. It’s a real phenomenon and cannot be ignored. The Ukrainian Youth Association, abbreviated as ”CYM” in Ukrainian (which I will refer to it as going forward) was founded in 1925 as an underground nationalist movement against Soviet control as a way to preserve Ukrainian culture. Broken up by the Soviets, with many members sent to the gulags thereafter, it was brought back into life post-WW2 in German refugee camps by Ukrainians who had cooperated with the nazis during the war. These were people who fought against the Soviets on the side of Nazi Germany as part of the OUN (the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) and their militant wing, the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army), who feared retribution for their collaboration with Germany and had participated in atrocities and pogroms against Jews within Ukraine and Poland (If you’ve heard the name Stephan Bandera in relation to Ukraine and the neo-nazi Azov Battalion, he is one of the founders of that group). Flash forward to 1949, and as a result of “Operation Paperclip” (Wherein nazis and their collaborators were brought over to resettle in the US to be used for secret government operations against communism/labor organizing and for their technical knowledge), not all the fascist-sympathizers were German, but Ukrainians as well. This was against the wishes of President Truman at the time, who specifically issued orders than no nazi sympathizers would be brought into the US, but under the leadership of Edward O’Connor, the effort brought such people into the USA and helped them also settle in South American countries and elsewhere, “bleaching” their backgrounds and using them for various purposes, both scientific/technical and as a means to quell worker unionizing since they were ardent fascists who hated the idea of communism. O’Connor was described by many as a fascist himself for his efforts to hide their true identities and reform their image in the public eye.

CYM came along with them, and the American branch was first established in Philadelphia in 1949 (to this day, Philadelphia remains the 2nd highest concentration of Ukrainians in the US). The organization was then spread to include camps in Chicago, Wisconsin, and other camps/branches, primarily in the Northeastern States. In total, today, there are four main Camps, and 28 branches across 12 US States. In a 2013 dedication of monuments at the Chicago branch to Bandera and Roman Shukhevych (the head of the UPA who held the rank of Captain in the German Wehrmacht and is on record as participating in pogroms against Jews and atrocities committed against Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia), the President of CYM confirmed that "The forefathers of CYM were members of OUN Banderivtsi and their supporters who developed a system to raise and develop youth to serve God and Ukraine". And the organization is not limited to the US, either. Currently, CYM operates in 13 other countries across the globe, with branches/camps in Canada, Germany, the UK, Austria, France, and several other European countries, as well as including branches in Australia and Argentina. As a personal observation, it seems, the countries that host these “cells” (as their Ukrainian-language website calls them) seem to be some of the most ardent supporters of Ukraine in their current conflict against Russia.

Now, it’s sort of - on the face - perhaps not something to question so much, until you recognize what a “youth camp” means within Ukraine itself. I’ve found records going back far beyond the current conflict, before Ukraine’s Maidan revolution in 2014, where many of these camps were hosted by groups like C14, Svoboda, and the Azov Battalion (all considered to be neo-nazi, “nationalist” groups that have thrived in post-Soviet, sovereign Ukraine:

(Excerpt from a November 2018 Morningstar UK article, “Fascists in training: Ukraine's nationalist youth camps”, which detailed life in one such camp ran by the Svoboda “nationalist” organization)