“Right Sector USA,” as in the little known, now defunct US branch of the notorious extremist Ukrainian organization Right Sector, appeared on Facebook in May 2014. By then, it already had an account on the Russian social media network VKontakte (VK), where it claimed to have started cells in Chicago and Tennessee, if only in the form of two individuals. In the coming weeks, Right Sector USA formally launched in the quasi-Ukrainian neighborhood of Manhattan’s East Village.
RS-USA’s first official meeting took place on the third floor of a building owned by the Organization for the Defense of the Four Freedoms for Ukraine (ODFFU), which has historically operated as a front for the OUN-B — the “revolutionary” faction of the fascistic Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists led by Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera until his assassination in 1959. Today the OUN-B is led by Stefan Romaniw, the longtime chairman of the Australian Federation of Ukrainian Organisations.
Right Sector is essentially the extremist Banderite cousin of the contemporary OUN-B, having been created by an OUN-B splinter group. During the Cold War, the Banderites set up numerous front groups under the umbrella of the “World Ukrainian Liberation Front,” spearheaded in the United States by the ODFFU. The ODFFU building on 2nd Avenue in Manhattan, located on the same block as the Ukrainian National Home and a famous Ukrainian restaurant, used to be called the Home of the Organizations of the Ukrainian Liberation Front. It is the historic US headquarters of the OUN-B, although its current status is more complicated. (more...)
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