Thread by @mossrobeson__

Meet Lev Dobriansky, the grandfather of the Ukrainian American community's "Banderization," a longtime Republican National Committee (RNC) official, leader of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA) and founder/chair of the National Captive Nations Committee (NCNC). /1

Dobriansky, born 1918 in NYC, was elected UCCA prez in 1949. He couldn't speak Ukrainian but felt a "deep inner certitude that the vast majority of the 40 million Ukrainians...are at one, in mind & soul" (i.e "intrinsically anti-communist," pro-western & anti-Russian). /2

In 1951 a close friend, colleague & CIA informant thought Dobriansky to be unaware and uninterested "in the party squabble and minor cleavages within the [Ukrainian] emigration." In 1953 they assisted a US govt effort to unite the emigration, and met Stepan Bandera in Europe. /3

The CIA had hoped to unite the Ukrainian diaspora under its control via the "left-wing," anti-Bandera faction of the far-right OUN-B (led by Bandera's wartime deputy turned postwar rival, Mykola Lebed). 1960s Dobriansky denounced Lebed as "soft on communism" and a "CIA tool." /4

By turn of the 60s Dobriansky was a staunch ally of Bandera's forever loyal deputy turned successor Yaroslav Stetsko, and got the Ukrainian war criminal his first visa to the US although the CIA + State wanted to "deny him one for the rest of his life." /5

After the US govt had smuggled Mykola Lebed (also a war criminal & Nazi collaborator) to NYC, but before Dobriansky met Bandera in Europe, a CIA analyst noted the hypocrisy of US policy vis a vis the OUN-B: "The Ukrainians do not understand the basis of American attitudes..." /6

1960s Mykola Lebed told the CIA, Dobriansky "receives a substantial part of his income from the Bandera group" & "may have CIA contacts." Not true said Lebed's case officer. "Then they must be DIA, Pentagon, etc." LD was well-connected via the American Security Council (ASC). /7

In 1959 Lev Dobriansky invented Captive Nations Week, which the POTUS has proclaimed each 3rd week of July ever since. It proved to be a beachhead for the John Birch Society (JBS) & Stetsko's ABN, the world's "largest & most important umbrella for former Nazi collaborators." /8

Stetsko visited the Reagan White House in 1983 to celebrate the 25th Captive Nations Week in history and ABN's 40th, by which time Lev Dobriansky was made Ambassador to the Bahamas, and his neoconservative daughter Paula Dobriansky joined the National Security Council. /9

Lev Dobriansky was at the center of the RNC's "ethnic strategy" since 1952. His daughter Paula, an original signatory of the Project for a New American Century, a pro-Trump neocon today, is one of the GOP's most respected "democracy promotion" experts. /10

“We shall continue to expose the Russia First movement in this country,” Lev promised over 50 years ago. Paula accused Obama of "unprecedented... abdication of American leadership," but has remained silent about Trump's relationship with Russia, hoping for a top job in his admin.