The Snake Island Institute (SII) is a military think tank on the rise and a central node in the “Azov Lobby.” Shortly before launching SII last year, its president Vladyslav Sobolevsky and executive director Maryna Hrytsenko visited Washington, D.C. with a delegation from the Azovite 3rd Assault Brigade. Sobolevsky, an alleged war criminal, was a deputy commander of that openly neo-Nazi unit, and before 2022, deputy chief of staff of the “National Corps,” the political party of the Azov movement.
“I am glad that we are not quite a party, but a social movement with real membership,” Sobolevsky once said about the National Corps. “We don’t even care about elections, we care about people who believe in our ideas and are ready to follow us.” In 2020, he squashed “the last Ukrainian peacemaker” Sergei Sivokho’s “National Platform for Reconciliation and Unity.” Asked about his favorite books that year, Sobolevsky named some by German WWII generals, Erich von Manstein and Burkhart Müller-Hillebrand, as well as “Campaign in Russia: The Waffen SS on the Eastern Front,” by the Belgian Nazi leader Léon Degrelle.
Last spring, Sobolevsky participated in a national security conference hosted by Harvard Business School and MIT, speaking after the deputy head of the U.S. Special Operations Command. In the fall, Sobolevsky and Hrytsenko returned to Washington for meetings at the State Department, the Atlantic Council, the Army and Navy Club, and with “DoD [Department of Defense] and congressional teams.” Now the Snake Island Institute has concluded another trip to Washington and “high-level meetings on Capitol Hill,” this time without him.
SII delegation in DC with House Speaker Mike Johnson
But first, some other updates on the Snake Island Institute that didn’t make it into my latest “Azov Lobby Review” (Fall 2025-Winter 2026). For starters, the SII has a new communications director, Christopher Collins. According to his website, “Since 2019, I have supported development projects financed by USAID, the FCDO [U.K. Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office], Global Affairs Canada, and European agencies.” At the time of the Russian invasion, Collins was a senior project manager for the U.S.-funded National Democratic Institute.
In February 2022, Frances Lee Forbes worked in the U.S. Senate as a legislative correspondent for Kyrsten Sinema (AZ-D). Last December, she became the International Partnerships Coordinator of Snake Island Institute. Earlier in 2025, SII hired a pair of Azov Battalion veterans, Maksym Pyska and Artem Klimin, as its Ukraine Partnership Officers. Klimin was a deputy battalion commander in the 3rd Assault Brigade, and Pyska most likely also served in this unit. In 2017, they co-founded the “National Militia,” the “combat wing” or “street branch” of the Azov movement and its National Corps. This neo-Nazi paramilitary organization relaunched as “Centuria” in 2020.
This is allegedly a picture of Maksym Pyska with an ISIS flag. Pyska, a football hooligan, fought in the Azov Battalion/Regiment, became the chief of staff of its “Civil Corps” (forerunner to the National Corps), and got involved with the Azovite “Youth Corps.” Now he works for Snake Island Institute.
As a reminder, just before the SII made it to Washington in September, Grace Wright left her job on Capitol Hill as the communications director for Congressman Jason Crow (D-CO) to become the Senior Analytics Manager of Snake Island Institute. Her old boss is a member of the House Foreign Affairs and House Intelligence committees. The SII also has new interns, such as Theo Hisherik, a British Jewish political science student at John Hopkins University in Baltimore who wrote a blog post for the Times of Israel about the necessity of confronting Iran: “The time for hesitant half-measures is over.”
In February, 3rd Assault Brigade combat medic Viktoria Honcharuk visited England, and addressed the Advanced Command and Staff Course at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom. She also met with the director of the Joint Services Command and Staff College. In March, the UK Defence Academy gave Honcharuk a shout-out for International Women’s Day. The next day she appeared on BBC News for a report on the “Ukrainian anti-drone ‘Bullet’ that could help defend Gulf.” Honcharuk, who used to work on Wall Street, is the SII’s Director of Defense Tech, and joined the latest trip to Washington.
Honcharuk at Morgan Stanley and the UK Defence Academy
Before Honcharuk got to England, the Snake Island Institute published a report, “Holding Back the Sky: Ukraine’s Air Defense Campaign, 2022-2025.” The SII produced this report with the “Intelligence Team” of the Azov movement’s “Colonel Yevhen Konovalets Military School,” which is named for the founder of the fascistic Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists that helped the Nazis to perpetrate the “Holocaust by Bullets.” Former CIA director David Petraeus praised their “superb analysis.” Laura Cooper, the former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia (2017-25), was so impressed that “I’m having my students at Georgetown refer to it during the technology segment of the course I’m teaching on Russia’s war on Ukraine. Thanks to Snake Island Institute for producing this!”
Laura Cooper testifying at 2019 impeachment hearing of Donald Trump
“Love everything the Snake Island Institute puts out,” said Chris O’Connor, the logistics warfare chair of the Naval Warfare Studies Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Perhaps thanks to him, SII’s Vladyslav Sobolevsky and Viktoria Honcharuk addressed a packed room at the Naval Postgraduate School last year.
Before the full delegation arrived in Washington, SII co-founders Maryna Hrytsenko (executive director) and Catarina Buchatskiy (Director of Analytics) flew to Florida. They participated in the Heritage Foundation’s inaugural Miami Security Forum, which promoted the “Donroe Doctrine” for 2-3 days in the Donald J. Trump Grand Ballroom at the Trump National Doral golf resort. The Heritage Foundation’s event organizer salivated at the possibility “for some real changes in Cuba.” Retired colonel Mike Jernigan from the Heritage Foundation — formerly the commanding officer of the Marine Corps Engineer School (2019-21) and a production fixer for the famous Youtuber “Mr. Beast” (2022-25) — moderated a panel discussion with Hrytsenko and Buchatskiy on the “Ukrainian Frontline Experience.”
Before co-founding Snake Island Institute, Maryna Hrytsenko was a foreign policy aide in Washington for Oleksandra Ustinova, the head of the liberal nationalist “Holos” faction in Ukrainian parliament. Catarina Buchatskiy, who interned at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, led a project with Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia, at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution about “lessons from the war in Ukraine for Taiwan, including research on the use of UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles] in Ukraine and how to transfer operational and tactical lessons to Taiwan.” Buchatskiy said she “got called a baby murderer” for wearing her “I love Raytheon” shirt around campus. Her boyfriend is the CEO of Neros Technologies, a Peter Thiel-funded startup company based in California that is among the “leading U.S. drone producers.”
McFaul is also a fan of Snake Island Institute
During a recent podcast interview for the Council on Foreign Relations, Catarina Buchatskiy made it sound as if the initiative to create Snake Island Institute did not come from the Azov movement, but herself and Hrytsenko. “We wanted to create a platform for the military,” she half-explained.
The concept of having this neutral third party that represents the military and works for them on their behalf is novel, in a way, and it definitely was not intuitive to a lot of our military partners when we first started talking to them about it, but pretty quickly, we were like, OK, let’s find the top military units that are really really the best of the best, and the best that we have, and sign them on. We’ll kind of act as their institute.
In other words, Snake Island Institute is a think tank that works for Ukraine’s most powerful neo-Nazi movement, because the Azovite 3rd Army Corps and 3rd Assault Brigade are clearly its main “military partners.” Anyway, I removed the paywall for my recent “Azov Lobby Review,” and might do the same with this article, but consider becoming a paying subscriber to learn more about SII’s latest trip to Washington and to support my work.
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“I am glad that we are not quite a party, but a social movement with real membership,” Sobolevsky once said about the National Corps. “We don’t even care about elections, we care about people who believe in our ideas and are ready to follow us.” In 2020, he squashed “the last Ukrainian peacemaker” Sergei Sivokho’s “National Platform for Reconciliation and Unity.” Asked about his favorite books that year, Sobolevsky named some by German WWII generals, Erich von Manstein and Burkhart Müller-Hillebrand, as well as “Campaign in Russia: The Waffen SS on the Eastern Front,” by the Belgian Nazi leader Léon Degrelle.
