Written by: Aidan Jonah

Who’s telling you about the dangers of ‘Russian disinformation’ in The Hill Times? One of the two people is none other than a woman The Canada Files caught making a pro-Bandera poster for a 2023 counter-protest.

Halyna Padalko, now a Digital Policy Hub fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, was caught by TCF making a pro-Bandera poster, through Instagram comments she made, back in October 2023. This poster was for a counter-protest by Ukrainian Resistance Canada against the Toronto Coalition Against NATO’s October 1, 2023, rally which “focused on demanding an end to the NATO proxy war on Russia using Ukraine”.

Padalko is the only person who’s taken responsibility for making posters which appeared at the counter-protest.

Instead of replying to a TCF request for comment, made at the time, Padalko made her Instagram account private.

The poster openly whines about “propaganda’ against “the name of a Ukrainian political figure”. The poster denies that Bandera was “a bloody criminal and a tool of the Nazis”, and claims he is attacked because “he dedicates his life to Independent Ukraine without Russian ‘brothers’”.

As this author explained when TCF broke the story last year, Bandera is an out-and-out Nazi:

“Stepan Bandera was a fascist and the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-B, which came from a split within the OUN. The OUN was founded in 1929, while its fascist and openly anti-Semitic ideology was that Jews and Russian-speaking citizens must be removed from Ukrainian society at any cost.

Members of the OUN collaborated with the Nazis as early as 1937, (OUN split into OUN-B and OUN-M in 1940) before Nazi Germany occupied Soviet Ukraine in 1941. Even Britannica acknowledges that “The Germans were accompanied on their entry into Lviv on June 30 by members of OUN-B”.

Bandera’s right-hand man, Yaroslav Stetsko, stated in his 1941 autobiography:

‘I therefore support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine, barring their assimilation and the like.’

Throughout World War II, the OUN-B and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) massacred more than 100,000 Poles and Jews, while the OUN-M collaborated with the Nazis throughout. During the Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine, 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews died and 800 000 were forced to flee. The OUN-B collaborated with the Nazis before their push for Ukrainian independence alienated them.

The OUN-B and UPA still fought against the Soviets, even when the Nazis cracked down on them, though this certainly didn’t stop them from killing Poles and Jews over the next few years.”

A picture posted on Instagram by Ukrainian Resistance Canada contained a sign stating: “It smells like Russian propaganda here”. Irony can be quite eye-catching sometimes.

And the pro-Bandera posters were held by these counter-protesters, at least 11 in total, according to footage reviewed by TCF back in 2023. One image posted by Ukrainian Resistance Canada showed an individual holding a set of flyers whose back colours and text match the back of the pro-Bandera poster.

The organizer of Ukraine Resistance Canada’s counter-protest, Tetiana Podobailo, said back then, in comment, that “The Ukrainian Resistance Canada organization did not create, did not approve, and did not distribute these posters” and that “The individuals shown in the photos are not part of our organization.” Having not approved the posters supposedly, then why would the organization itself post footage on their Instagram stories and post images that include the poster on an Instagram post. Who knows?

Months later, Ukrainian economist Roman Hubriienko informed The Canada Files that at this rally, a counter-protesting woman said about rally attendees in a Ukrainian Toronto Television interview (3:31-3:44): “On the other side there was a bunch of biological garbage, absolutely devoid of moral values".

In 2024, Padalko plays ‘disinformation expert’

Padalko, the pro-Bandera poster maker, returned to The Canada Files’ attention because she co-wrote, alongside Ann Fitz-Gerald, a September 23, 2024, op-ed in The Hill Times: “What should Canada learn from the Russians at War case?”

Padalko and Fitz-Gerald are concerned about “access to accurate, comprehensive, and unbiased information” which they say is “a fundamental human right” while “Russian propaganda” supposedly wants to “undermine the very concept of truth”.

Who exactly gets to determine what is “access to accurate, comprehensive, and unbiased information”? The authors say Canada’s government must “enhance our strategic communication inside the country to promote a Canadian narrative characterizing democratic values”, in addition to strengthening soft power abroad. So, in short, the Canadian government.

This op-ed has echoes of Estonian Nazi ‘disinformation expert’ Marcus Kolga and the rest of the Canadian-government funded Canadian Digital Media Research Network’s concerns about “Russian narratives” potentially spreading in Canada. It also has echoes about the concerns of a Canadian/US/European government(s)-funded think tank, Institute for Strategic Dialogue, about the danger of “Chinese narratives” which directly named The Canada Files and China-based Canadian Youtuber, Daniel Dumbrill.

Pretensions of internal democracy in Canada are no concern to the likes of Kolga, Padalko, CDMRN and other pretend “disinformation experts“ whose only real expertise is in themselves disinforming the Canadian public, along with various imperial think tanks, imperial diaspora factions and the government itself.

Canadians beware, your right to dissent is about to be stripped from you very soon, if anti-imperialist political consciousness outside of just Palestine isn’t grown with great urgency. Smell the roses before its too late and remember that you’ll be the ones in Canada suffering the consequences of your own anti-imperialist political action, or lack thereof. The Global South is on the rise, and right now you’re not on track to join them in having a better future. Change that.

Aidan Jonah is the Editor-in-Chief of The Canada Files, a socialist, anti-imperialist news outlet founded in 2019. Jonah wrote a report for the 48th session of the UN Human Rights Council, held in September 2021.

Editor’s note: The Canada Files is the country's only news outlet focused on Canadian foreign policy. We've provided critical investigations & hard-hitting analysis on Canadian foreign policy since 2019, and need your support.

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