Yurij Wowczuk, the oldest brother, is obviously on board with the Banderites. He has said that Dmytro Dontsov (1883–1973), the Ukrainian fascist ideologue, “definitely solidified my beliefs and point of view as a teenager, young adult.” Less than 300 people have “liked” the OUN-B’s official Facebook page (est. 2023), and Yurij is one of them.

He studied economics and Ukrainian literature at Harvard University in the 1990s, and spent most of the past decade working in a senior position for Matthews International, which “designs, manufactures, and markets memorialization products and brand solutions for the cemetery and funeral home industries in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Europe, Australia, and Asia.”

Morgantown, West Virginia

By 2017, the Wowczuk brothers created the Civil-Military Innovation Institute (CMI2) in Morgantown, West Virginia, and appear to have co-founded Necessity Ventures, “a venture capital firm that makes strategic tactical investments in innovative companies supporting the America First vision.” The CMI2 grew out of the “Smart Defense Consortium,” which ran the “Center for Smart Defense” at West Virginia University in Morgantown, just south of the Pennsylvania border.

According to an early tax filing, “The Center will initiate research partnerships between West Virginia University faculty, staff, and students and outside organizations inside the Department of Defense and the broader national security community.”

[…]

Referring to CMI2’s “business incubator campus” in Morgantown, the Republican governor declared earlier this year, “West Virginia is becoming an ideal location for defense companies wanting to develop new tactics.”

In the springtime, WV Metro News reported that “300 of the top-trained soldiers in the U.S. Army were being put to the test” at the CMI2-operated facility in Fola, “including the 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and the 82nd Airborne Division from Fort Bragg, North Carolina.” Around then, Senator Capito said she was “proud that U.S. Cyber Command is […] harnessing the forward-thinking expertise of West Virginia’s own Civil-Military Innovation Institute.”

Zenovy Wowczuk received a standing ovation during the 2023 West Virginia State of the State Address (January 2023), and made a speech at the “Adaptive Experimentation Facility” groundbreaking event (November 2023)

[…]

The Wowczuk brothers established the Vovk Foundation a year ago, in part to “promote defense and commercial innovation activities,” and to “amplify the facts about Ukraine and Ukrainian Nationalism.” Its website honors their grandfather as a “leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.”

Zenovy Wowczuk is the president of the foundation, which shares a mailing address with the Civil-Military Innovation Institute, but his oldest brother could be calling the shots. It was Yurij Wowczuk that recently announced “the official restart and reactivation” of an OUN-B front group in the Pittsburgh area.

This year the Vovk Foundation partnered with the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America to create a college scholarship for Ukrainian Americans. In August, the UNWLA awarded the first “Vovk Foundation Scholarship” to a student at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, who dreams “to be a senior U.S. government advisor to Ukraine.”

Later that month, the Vovk Foundation recognized the 140th birthday of Dmytro Dontsov, and Yurij Wowczuk recorded a podcast episode about this fascist ideologue, whose “insightful and timeless philosophies, rooted in a ‘stone heart and burning faith,’ paved the way for the emergence and continued evolution of the Ukrainian nationalist ideology through active nationalism.”

“No doubt that Dontsov’s philosophy had an influence on my grandfather’s writings, speeches, and approaches to supporting the diaspora,” Yurij Wowczuk said in the podcast episode with his uncle, who once reviewed Trevor Erlacher’s 2021 biography of Dmytro Dontsov. (“In further reading of the book, however, I find a weakness in the author’s aversion to discussing the blank pages of Ukrainian history [original emphasis] […] I find that the purpose of the deliberate drum beat about Ukrainian Anti-Semitism, is to deflect the knowledge about the complicity of the Jewish NKVD participation and leadership in the execution of the Holodomor […]”)

Yurij Wowczuk is now threatening legal action against this article’s author. Yes, I’m being serious.