Kuzan led the MNK during the 2013-14 “Euromaidan” protests in Kyiv, when it created the 14th “Free People” company of the “Maidan Self-Defense Force” led by far-right politician Andriy Parubiy. After they toppled the “pro-Russian” president, Kuzan became an advisor to Parubiy, the new secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council. Meanwhile, MNK member Andriy Levus, another Parubiy associate, served as the deputy head of the Security Service of Ukraine “responsible for work with the volunteer battalions that were being created at that time.” Years later, Levus led the Capitulation Resistance Movement.

The USCC team traces its origins to the 14th “Free People” company of the Maidan Self-Defense. On the left is USCC communication director Olesia Horiainova.

By 2015, Levus and Kuzan were coordinators of the MNK’s “Free People” volunteer network, which supplied miscellaneous aid and sometimes Banderite literature to various volunteer battalions and military units, including those in the Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR). Serhiy Kuzan and his budding sidekick Dmytro Zhmailo, the deputy chairman of the MNK (2015-19), served as liaisons to their Banderite backers in Canada, including the Buduchnist Credit Union Financial Group and its BCU Foundation, which is dominated by the OUN-B’s League of Ukrainian Canadians.

When Kuzan kicked off his spring 2015 tour of Canada’s Ukrainian community, which included meetings with leading Conservative politicians, the Banderite newspaper in Toronto, “Homin Ukrainy,” reported that “over the past year,” “Kuzan has been working closely with the League of Ukrainian Canadians […] to ensure that money raised […] is received, well-spent, and that materials purchased are directly delivered to the front lines.” After conducting an “exclusive interview” with him in 2016, the NATO Association of Canada described Serhiy Kuzan as “the coordinator of the Kharkiv division of the Ukrainian Volunteer Network ‘Free People’ and one of the main coordinators of the [BCU Foundation’s] Friends of Ukraine Defence Forces Fund, sponsored by the League of Ukrainian Canadians.”

A few years later, after leaving Andriy Levus’ latest iteration of “Free People,” Kuzan and Zhmailo presented themselves as representatives of another fund at the BCU Foundation to support the families of the “Heavenly Hundred” who died in the false-flag Maidan massacre of February 2014. Amidst those mass killings, which took the lives of protesters and police, it was Levus, as a deputy commander of the Maidan Self-Defense, who ominously told a government official, “We will guarantee the safety of the police if they leave the city.”

[…]

In early 2022 the USCC also arranged a trip to eastern Ukraine for The Guardian’s Luke Harding, the author of a 2017 book, “Collusion,” the story of “How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.” Harding, a prominent journalist and Russiagate peddler who wrote a fake story about Julian Assange taking meetings with Paul Manafort, subsequently gave the Kuzan team shoutouts online. He became just the second person to follow the USCC on Twitter. In his 2022 book, “Invasion,” the acknowledgements section named Serhii Kuzan, Dmytro Zhmailo, Olesia Horiainova, and Volodymyr Yurchenko, the USCC’s Banderite videographer who worked with The Guardian multiple times that year.

Perhaps with a boost from Harding, in the spring of 2022 the USCC chairman started to be regularly quoted in major Western publications. Meanwhile, the organization forged an important connection to the HUR’s new Kraken unit based in Kharkiv, where Serhii Kuzan used to coordinate the Free People network. Kuzan doesn’t hail from Kharkiv, but Andriy Rudenko does. The latter is a former “Turn off Russian” activist from the MNK and Free People. He appears to coordinate the Kraken regiment’s “Support Group,” and maybe also the “Humanitarian Center Kharkiv” that has rebranded as “USCC humanitarian” on Facebook. According to Pete Shmigel, an Australian USCC supporter from a Banderite family, Rudenko is a “Kraken soldier who runs a humanitarian program” and is responsible for the neo-Nazi HUR unit’s cooperation with the center in Kharkiv.

[…]

Meanwhile, the USCC chairman wrote an op-ed for The Hill: “Ukraine doesn’t have a Nazi problem, but Russia sure does.” Earlier that year, Kuzan promoted a documentary about the HUR’s “Russian Volunteer Corps” which is led by Russian neo-Nazis from the Azov movement. That was surprising to see coming from a Banderite, but then again, this one is likely in cahoots with the HUR. In any case, the USCC team, and especially its chairman, have been extensively quoted by Western media over the past couple years—such as this summer by the Wall Street Journal editorial board about Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk, Russia. Another example from The Hill, “Ukraine pushes for long-range strikes as troops advance in Russia” (8/21/24):

Dmytro Zhmailo, executive director of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, said the “threat of escalation has actually no basis,” and that view has been reinforced by Ukrainian military intelligence.

Daniel Fried, a “distinguished fellow” at the Atlantic Council, and former Coordinator for Sanctions Policy in the State Department under Barack Obama, recently spoke to students at the SBU National Academy, with moderators from the USCC. Shortly after Biden took office in 2021, Fried told a conference organized by U.S. Banderite leaders, “It will not be a return to the Obama administration. It will be a return to the best [—in other words, the most hawkish—] sides of the Obama administration, without some of the disheartening debates that happened internally.” Fried was the co-author of an Atlantic Council policy paper, “Biden and Ukraine: A strategy for the new administration.” In December 2021, the journalist Leonid Ragozin observed, “For now, it seems that Biden is closely following its suggestions.”