Semenyaka (second from left) at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, November 2026

Olena Semenyaka, the international secretary of the Azov movement, and its main advocate for a “White Reconquista” in Europe, has made serious inroads over the past year, culminating in her invitation to the U.S. embassy in Kyiv on Monday to celebrate the 251st birthday of the Marine Corps. “We are trying to become mainstream without compromising some of our core ideas,” Semenyaka said years ago, explaining that “it’s possible for far-right leaders to come to power now” in Europe, and she “wants a position at the front of this movement.”

In 2020, a French researcher dubbed Semenyaka “The ‘First Lady’ of Ukrainian Nationalism.” This is a woman who once posed with a Nazi flag, extending her right arm above her head, and admitted that she hopes “to create our own Right International,” and has even praised the neo-Nazi accelerationist “Misanthropic Division” as being among “the best of the modern Right.” In 2019, she apparently told the U.S. neo-Nazi website “Counter-Currents” that “we are striving for power and are ready to implement different scenarios,” boasting that the Azov movement had a “military wing unseen since the times of WW2.” There is, of course, no evidence that Semenyaka has moderated her extremist views or ambitions. In 2024, for example, she attended a pan-European neo-Nazi conference in Lviv, which she may have organized herself, supported by several Ukrainian military intelligence units.

Earlier this year, the Ukrainian online newspaper Left Bank apparently searched far and wide for a decent picture of Semenyaka, landing on this one. She is sitting at a table adorned with the Black Sun, a notorious neo-Nazi symbol.

Almost a year ago, Olena Semenyaka attended (and helped to organize) the annual youth conference of the Kyiv Security Forum (KSF), “Ukraine’s Premier International Platform on War, Peace, and Security,” which is partnered with NATO. According to Semenyaka, “I had the honor to contribute to the even greater involvement of the 3rd Army Corps,” in other words, the Azov movement. As a result, the head of research and development for the 3rd Army Corps’ anti-aircraft regiment (“Boche”) shared the stage with the managing director of Quantum Systems, a German military technology company based in Munich. One of the organizers even thanked Semenyaka for making “an invaluable contribution to the preparation and implementation of the 11th KSF for young people! I’m sure we have many more joint projects ahead of us!”

Olena Semenyaka posted these pictures of herself with Kateryna Sychova, the “ultra-productive representative” of the KSF that involved her in organizing the event.

Some weeks before the KSF youth event, Semenyaka appears to have dined with Jannis George and Annie Hunecke, a pair of Germans associated with the AfD’s youth organization and the European white nationalist “Identitarian” movement. Earlier this year, George and Hunecke interviewed Greg Bovino, the former commander of Donald Trump’s U.S. Border Patrol, at the 2026 “Remigration Summit” in Portugal, which was hosted by a group called “Reconquista” to advocate for ethnic cleansing Europe via mass deportations.

Days before the 2026 Remigration Summit, Jannis George published a video featuring Semenyaka from his 2025 trip to Ukraine with Annie Hunecke.

At the start of 2026, Olena Semenyaka sat down for a podcast interview conducted by Hanna Hopko, a famous “anti-corruption activist” and former “liberal nationalist” politician who chaired the foreign affairs committee of the Verkhovna Rada (2014-19), during which time she all but lived in Washington and indulged her fantasy of breaking up Russia into numerous states. In 2014, Hopko gave Vice President Joe Biden a tour of Independence Square (the famous “Maidan”) in Kyiv, and he introduced her at a “Democracy Award Dinner” back in Washington.

Hopko introduced Semenyaka to her small audience as a “philosopher” who “researches various right-wing radical movements.” The episode is titled, “Europe on the brink of collapse. Ukraine — the last shield against the Kremlin.” The video starts with Hopko commenting, “We must do everything we can to ensure that Russia repeats the fate of the Soviet Union,” and Semenyaka says, “We are truly on the verge of a possible third world war, redivision of the world, new totalitarian tendencies.” The thumbnail of the video declares, “On the Doorstep. Third World War.”

According to Olena Semenyaka, she was invited to the 2026 Kyiv Security Forum by its executive director, Ramina Shut. This is apparently the right-hand woman to Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the former Prime Minister of Ukraine (2014-16) who founded the KSF. At this year’s event, Semenyaka took a group picture with Steven Pifer, a former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine (1998-2000) who is affiliated with the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, and Hannah Thoburn, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington and former staffer of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (2019-24). Semenyaka also met Andrzej Duda, the former President of Poland (2015-25). In the following days, she attended an event organized by the Polish embassy.

Semenyaka with Duda, Thoburn, and Pifer at the 2026 Kyiv Security Forum

During the summer of 2026, Olena Semenyaka and other Azovites (including Andriy Holubev, deputy chief of staff of the 3rd Army Corps) completed a “leadership course” sponsored by the Ukrainian Freedom Fund (UFF), a 501©(3) charity established in 2014 and headquartered in a small town in Wyoming. In September, Ukraine’s new commander-in-chief Mykhailo Drapaty addressed one of these “UFF-supported courses.” The UFF says that it has a “close and trusted relationship with the leadership of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.” What about the U.S. military or intelligence community?

Olena Semenyaka at the “UFF-supported course”

UFF founder Andrew Bain is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who is credited as “one of the early founders of the advertising and media industries in Ukraine.” In 2022, he co-founded the “Mozart Group,” a private military company for western volunteers to counter the Russian “Wagner Group” in Ukraine. He did so with Andrew Milburn, who (according to the Middle East Institute) “retired from the Marine Corps in 2019 as the Deputy Commander of Special Operations Command Central, the headquarters responsible for all US special operations in the Middle East.”

The Mozart Group imploded by January 2023, not long after Milburn drunkenly rambled on a podcast about Ukraine killing Russian prisoners of war and having a “corrupt, fucked-up society.” As for Bain, he remains the CEO of the Ukrainian Freedom Fund and a “training company,” Sonata Holding LLC, also based in Afton, Wyoming, that appears to be a successor to the Mozart Group. Representatives of “Sonata” recently celebrated the 251st birthday of the Marine Corps with Olena Semenyaka.

The reported address of Sonata Holding LLC is occupied by a tax accountant

In 2023-24, Sonata Holding signed a memorandum of cooperation with the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute and conducted a “Military Decision Making Process Course” for staff members of Ukraine’s National Army Academy. Aside from sharing a CEO, there seems to be significant overlap between “Sonata” and the UFF, such as Trent Gibson, seen in the photo below standing on the far right. Gibson, a Marine Corps veteran, is the “Training and Operations Director” at Sonata, which he says is “one of the few private firms conducting in-country training with the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense for officers and staff.” Shortly before attending the event at the U.S. embassy, Sonata “expert” Andriy Ryzhenko (also seen below) joined a UFF delegation that traveled to Texas and met with the Dallas mayor’s office. Ryzhenko is a Ukrainian Navy veteran and former NATO staff officer who writes for the Eurasia Daily Monitor, which is published by the Jamestown Foundation, a conservative think thank founded in 1984 with the support of Ronald Reagan’s CIA director.

From left to right: unidentified, Olena Semenyaka, unidentified, Andriy Ryzhenko (Sonata LLC), Anastasia Polishchuk, and Trent Gibson (Sonata LLC)

Olena Semenyaka now describes herself as an analyst at the “Institute for Cognitive Defense,” which Mykhailo Basarab, a senior fellow of the Kyiv Security Forum, launched in September 2026. In the summer of 2019, after Volodymyr Zelensky was elected in a landslide promising to end the war in eastern Ukraine, Basarab speculated on TV that Zelensky’s presidency was a “Russian special operation.” He subsequently joined the leadership of the far-right “Capitulation Resistance Movement,” which threatened Zelensky with a potentially far bloodier “Maidan” uprising if he negotiated with Russia. At the end of 2019, Zelensky and Putin met face to face in Paris, but there was no diplomatic breakthrough. With Andriy Biletsky, leader of the Azov movement, standing on stage behind him, Mykhailo Basarab assured anti-peace protesters that night in Kyiv that “Zelensky did not cross red lines.” At some point, Basarab became friends with Semenyaka.

For now, the “Institute of Cognitive Defence” has launched a small Youtube show. Semenyaka has appeared in two of its panel discussions since late October, titled “Europe’s Protests: What Russia Wants You to Believe?” and “The Ukrainians Putin Fears Most: Why Russia Targets Azov and the Third Assault Corps.” For the first one, she was joined by Mykhailo Basarab and Serhiy Kvit, another former leader of the Capitulation Resistance Movement, and the president of Semenyaka’s Azov-friendly alma mater, the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (NaUKMA). Earlier this year at the NaUKMA museum, Kvit and Semenyaka introduced an essay contest for “conservative” students.

Kvit and Semenyaka at the NaUKMA museum

Just days ago, Semenyaka and Basarab tackled the recent exposure of a secret detention facility run by the 1st Azov Corps in the Kyiv region, mainly by discussing the years long “Russian propaganda” about neo-Nazis in Ukraine. Olena Semenyaka singled out Le Monde, Bellingcat, and the U.S.-funded RFE/RL for spreading lies about her and the Azov movement, for example that she spent years trying to cultivate a “right-wing extremist international.” She concluded that the Ukrainian military (read: Azov units) should “communicate more actively with our Western partners to influence them,” and suggested there needs to be “accountability for spreading all these toxic narratives,” whether it be for Ukrainian civilians resisting mobilization, or western journalists.

One day after the Institute for Cognitive Defense published its latest episode with Semenyaka, the Marine Corps turned 251 years old, and El Pais reported that the Spanish neo-Nazi group Núcleo Nacional (“National Core”) received paramilitary training from the 1st Azov Corps in order to “carry out an armed uprising” back home in Spain. However, I suspect that they actually trained with the 3rd Army Corps, and eventually we will learn that Semenyaka had something to do with it.

Núcleo Nacional published this image of its members in Ukraine, overlaid with the symbol of their group, which is reminiscent of the Azovite “Idea of the Nation” wolfsangel. Some of their sweatshirts say “Storm Front,” referencing one of the oldest neo-Nazi internet forums, founded in the 1990s by a former KKK leader, but they also include the symbol of the 3rd Assault Brigade and 3rd Army Corps.

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