Ukraine Relief gets support from homosexual lobby and Russian Foreign Intelligence, or Why I refuse to help Ukraine.
Today the Ukrainian diaspora of Sacramento celebrates the 25th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union and its corrupt legacy. The celebration was envisioned by a local charity called Ukraine Relief that was founded about two years ago by the staff and the congregation of Bethany Church, including myself.
Yesterday I was thrown out from the “Ukraine independence celebratory dinner” hosted by Ukraine Relief in Sacramento. The formal explanation by Stephan Skots, the chairman of the fund, was that I was not issued the necessary credentials by the event organizers.
But the truth is not as simple. I probably should familiarize you with the history of this conflict and some inner workings of the Ukrainan charity.
In September 2014, Stephan Skots, one of the founders of Ukraine Relief, invited me to Bethany Church for a meeting and asked me to handle the media campaign for his newly founded company. I still remember the day we met for the first time at the Great Mission office.
It was obvious that the guys had no idea where to start, but they told me they wanted “to help Ukraine”. At that time I had just returned from a trip across the European part of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine where I witnessed people’s life with my own eyes, so I was ready to work with the Californian diaspora to help the poor people of Eastern Ukraine.
I had been working for seven months on creating the brand image for the new company. I have published numerous news articles, interviews and videos to promote it. It was my idea to invite Pastor Gennadiy Mokhnenko for that shocking interview to Impact, where he threatened to destroy Putin with his notorious “red button”. Nowadays I feel more regretful than proud of it.
Mikhail Saakashvili appeals to the US Ukrainians to return home
First of all, as soon as I started working with this Ukrainian team, I started noticing propaganda trends typical for a dictatorship. The censorship was always there.
Furthermore, once I published a news article about some shenanigans of a local “community leader”. When that person got mad about the article and called me, Sergey Vronskyy, one of the project founders, advised me to blackmail him – that is, to publish the article and offer to delete it from my website for a fee. Naturally, I was shocked by such an appaling idea. I have always been trying to be an honest journalist who writes the truth for the sake of truth, not money.
Another sign of unscrupulousness I noticed when Vronskyy and me went to the Hayward port to oversee a container shipment. As we drove to the place, he was bragging about his connections and fancy restaurants. For example, he told me about some lavish dinners in Napa where they used to spend $200 per plate.
“That’s not all,” – he kept boasting, – “whenever a friend of mine strikes another deal, we go to San Francisco to celebrate and spend $1000 each at a restaurant”.
And local businessmen write this man checks for tens of thousands of dollars just because he claims to collect the money for a charity in Ukraine?
This is when Vronskyy confided to me that he would rather take money from a gay philantropist than from Bethany Church (with whose bishop’s blessing Ukraine Relief came to existence). The administration of Bishop Adam Bondaruk sent hefty checks to the charity on more than one occasion.
I was not going to wash the dirty laundry in public, but I just may have to in the light of what is happening today in Sacramento. Skots and Vronskyy don’t seem to be embarassed by the fact that some of the money channeled to Ukraine Relief Bondaruk secretly receives from the Russian Orthodox Church in Sacramento – to be exact, from Stanislav Kholodkov, a Cossack ataman and a Russian Foreign Intelligence officer who regularly conducts military training exercizes at the Elim church camp in Marysville. Slavic Sacramento has the evidence of this.
I wonder if Savchenko knows about it? Or maybe the famous California shrimp made her break one of her hunger strikes?
Slavic Sacramento’s editor in chief ejected from Savchenko and Saakashvili’s dinner
In 2014 I just came back from Ukraine where I visited the Pilgrim orphanage run by Gennadiy Mokhnenko. I saw his adopted children sleep on the dirty floor. I witnessed Gennadiy saving a young girl from a rapist in a small village near Mariupol. I saw him and his heroic wife living in a tiny shack, I visited several abandoned hospices where Gennadiy took care of dying old people and drug addicts. To say the least, I feel very uncomfortable listening to California Ukrainians bragging about their lavish lifestyle at the expense of the believers.
All that time Vronskyy assured me that no one compensates him for his work at Ukraine Relief. Although I still do not quite understand how a married man with kids could spend days in the office without getting paid. In all 7 months of my work there (often around the clock and on weekends) I received only about $2 000, so I had to do some side projects to pay my bills. But these days Stephan Skots and his team do not need people like me. They recruit their friends and relatives and make up to the murderer Savchenko and the government delegation from Kiev while gathering the support of California’s pro-gay politicians.
Skots’ ways remind me more and more the misdeeds of Bishop Adam Bondaruk. We have a lot of questions about his suspicious activities. But let’s go back to the donations for Ukraine.
In our media campaign Sergey Vronskyy appealed to Americans and the Slavic diaspora to skip Starbucks and donate money for Ukraine. In just a few months Ukraine Relief gathered about $100 000 in Internet donations alone. Cash donations probably were not even counted, many people just brought cash money in the envelopes. There were also boxes of brand new children’s clothes, medical equipment and so on. All the America rised to help Ukraine, even some people from Europe wrote letters and sent money.
Today, when the Ukrainian support gathered some momentum, representatives of Ukraine Relief fly around the world and spend money on ex-presidents and military pilots so they would help them raise more money with a “charity” dinner in Sacramento.
After about 7 months of our activity the company founders announced that we have gathered around 1 million dollars. But for some reason I have never seen any official report on how much money was collected and how was it spent.
So on behalf of Slavic Sacramento readers and the people of California I demand from the leadership of Ukraine Relief to publish a detailed report about the money that has been donated and spent. The money was donated by all of us, by the Ukrainian, Russian and other churches of Sacramento and other US cities. I am sure that all of us would like to know where exactly did our money go.
This fund does not belong to Adam Bondaruk or Stephan Skots, it belongs to the Slavic community of California.
As I was told by Mr Saakashvily in the state Capitol a few days ago, the recognition of Holodomor is a major milestone in the history of Ukraine. He said that the corruption is the legacy of the Soviet Union and there will never be a new, honest and open society in Ukraine until the old ways die off.
Bishop’s son Pyotr Bondaruk sentenced to 6 years
So, my dear Stephan Skots, don’t be like the corrupt Soviet leaders, publish the information about all your incomes and all the donations to Ukraine Relief, as well as the income of all your employees and brothers, or the people will no longer trust you or donate to you.
On the day before I visited the California Parliament where the resolution about Holodomor recognition was signed. I also visited an official event with Assembly Member Ken Cooley. I was never asked for any credentials. So it is for you to decide whether you should donate money for Ukraine through such shameless “businessman missionaries” as those in Ukraine Relief.
By the way, among the co-authors of the resolution to recognize Holodomor (ACR-45) are such politicians as the sworn enemy of the Slavic diaspora in Sacramento, the first openly gay senator from San Francisco Mark Leno and others like him. Not too long ago Bishop Adam Bondaruk personally preached to his congregation to fight against Leno’s “diabolic” bill.
But it seems like today’s Ukrainian diaspora of Sacramento is overcome by the big money, the hunger-striking Savchenko and the gays…
Ruslan Gurzhiy, SlavicSac.com
