Doctor Death: Ukraine's Nazi-loving Health Privatizer
Neo-nazis and neo-liberals
Today we will be having a look at Ulyana Suprun, American-born Ukrainian minister of health from 2016-2019. She is pictured on the right, with the gentleman on the left being Serhii Sternenko. According to Suprun, ‘we can all become like Serhii’. Soon we will find out what she meant by that. In short, the reader will be treated to yet another example of the tight alliance between Ukrainian neoliberals and neonazis.
Suprun has quite an interesting background. According to strana.ua journalist Aleksei Romanov:
This U.S. citizen appeared in Ukraine at the end of 2013, right at the start of the coup. Few know that she is the daughter of George Harry Yurkiv, a shareholder and vice-president of "North American Controls."
This is a major Pentagon contractor that manufactures hydraulic and control components for M1 Abrams tanks, armored personnel carriers, and other combat vehicles.
Suprun’s grandmother was also a ‘member of the Ukrainian liberation movement of the 1930s and 1940s’, from which one can draw the obvious conclusions. While she herself grew up in Detroit, her husband Marko grew up in Canada. After taking part in Maidan in 2013, she became head of humanitarian initiatives of the Global Congress of Ukrainians.
She only received Ukrainian citizenship in 2015, given personally by Poroshenko. It was given on the basis that she was a ‘person, regarding whom the granting of citizenship is a matter of national interest.’ Her government career began immediately after, eventually becoming minister of health in 2016 on Poroshenko’s recommendation.
On February 5 2019, the Kiev regional administrative court demanded that the state migration service check whether Suprun still had US сitizenship. A Ukrainian politician had brought the case to the court, noting that occupying a ministerial post as a dual citizen is illegal (which doesn’t stop people of course, as the cases of Natalie Jaresko and Igor Kolomoisky showed). Given that Suprun moved back to the USA in 2020, it seems likely that she was indeed a dual citizen all that time. Not that one needs to guess, given her political career.
The medical front
Of her various struggles, she was of course most well known for her medical reforms. It was for this reason that she received the epithet ‘Doctor Death’ in Ukraine. According to a March 2020 poll by the Ukrainian ‘Reiting’, only 18% of Ukrainians were pleased with Suprun’s medical reforms. Only 19% considered Suprun’s work in the ministry of health to have been positive. 62% considered her influence to have been negative.
According to Focus.ua, Suprun’s ‘British-style’ reform meant that state funds for medicine went to insurance companies who paid medical institutions for parients served. As a result, smaller medical institutions, which Ukraine is filled with, went bankrupt. There are constant problems with missing salaries for Ukraine’s medical staff. The number of medical personnel is repeatedly slashed. This leaves many people in rural areas or smaller towns without any medical assistance at all. It also became more difficult to acquire medicine.
Because of these ‘rationalizations’, there was an epidemic of closures of psychiatric institutions in 2020. It became even more normal to see severely mentally ill people wandering the streets. Another result was that by the end of the Poroshenko government in 2019, Ukraine had 10 thousnad hospital beds with oxygen, which hardly served it well during covid.
While having kind words for her during his election campaign, once he got into power Zelensky was clear that he didn’t approve of her reforms He even referred to the fact that she is often called ‘Doctor Death’. Ruslan Stefanchuk, key member of Zelensky’s command, said that ‘people haven’t gotten the results that people in other countries got after implementing the same unpopular reforms’. She was sacked in September 2019. After leaving her post, she dedicated herself to ‘attacking soviet myths’ about medicine on Facebook, as well as arguing in favour of legalizing cannabis.
Suprun’s friends
Suprun was never ‘just’ a privatizer of medicine. Ukraine’s liberals and nationalists have always been more than allies - but really two departments of the same organization.
One of her most well-known friends is Serhiy Sternenko. Nowadays, he, alongside Sorosite luminary Serhiy Pritula, seem poised to be the atlanticist candidates for Ukraine’s next elections, if they will ever take place. Sternenko is someone I plan to write about more in the future. Even some of Ukraine’s liberal media like Hromadske wrote a three part take down of Sternenko and his drug-dealing extortion rackets.
In any case, for the purpose of this article, we will be having a look at Suprun’s support of Sternenko during his battle with the law. He was having troubles with the law - though never actually imprisoned for it - because of a murder he committed on camera.
According to Sternenko’s supporters, there had been three attempts on his life in Odessa in the time leading up to May 2018, when two unarmed men approached Sternenko. The young patriot decided to take the offensive, seriously wounding one of them and running after the other, stabbing him to death on the ground. This was all live streamed on Facebook by Sternenko’s partner, who became Suprun’s office assistant in July 2020.
Absurdly, Sternenko was ruled the victim by a May 2020 ruling, because his hand was wounded (by his own knife!). The murdered man was ruled the aggressor, which, as the prosecution lawyer told strana.ua, is itself illegal. In the two years prior to this, protection by the Poroshenko government meant that Sternenko didn’t spend a day in jail for a murder he live streamed. When he came to the SBU court in May 2020 to see if he would receive a formal accusation, he was accompanied by over 100 angry ‘activists’. Ulyana Suprun also came along to support the young patriot at the SBU building in June 2020.
According to Suprun, Sternenko is a ‘model for the new Ukrainian’. She wrote the following on facebook in 2020, also blaming Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and Zelensky for the crackdown on freedom fighters like Sternenko:
Sergiy Sternenko for me is an example of that generation of Ukrainians who will be able to put everything in its place. These people were born and raised in an independent Ukraine. They, like no others, have a great demand for justice, security, and the real effectiveness of the state. And it is very important not to let them be intimidated, to crush their ability to speak the truth, to turn them into cynics.
When such people in their hometowns or villages start calling things by their real names and actively prevent theft by the likes of [Mayor of Odessa] Trukhanov, they face attacks, assassination attempts, and persecution by police and prosecutors, who often serve not the citizens, but local feudal lords.
By the way, regarding Avakov - the subterranean aspect of this whole story is the struggle between what one might call the NGO Right (Sternenko, supported by Suprun) and the Statist Right (Azov, supported by Avakov). Sternenko has old beef with Azov. The latter point out how he has never gone to the frontline but bases his whole career off fundraising for the army. Sternenko is also accused of being supported by ‘woke Sorosites’, which, to be fair, is true. Grand Fuhrer of Azov, Andrii Biletsky, even beat up some Azovites for their support of Sternenko in 2020. I also suspect that their conflict has at least some of its basis in conflict over control of drug trafficking. Both Azov and Sternenko have been accused of plenty of that.
The pro-Sternenko protests were quite funny. I remember how at the time every self-respecting hipster in Kiev took up Sternenko’s defense. All the vegan anarchists were in love. When I asked some of them I knew at the time why they supported him, they gave some vague formulations. The protests themselves, which famously included an attack on the president’s office in March 2021 which cost 2 million hryvnias to repair, also included liberal NGO activists chanting slogans about the need for anti-corruption court reforms - which, not coincidentally, is the main demand of the IMF.
The protests in June 2020 in support of Sternenko were quite the show. There was a wide range of Poroshenkite era rightwingers there, from Yanina Sokolova to Yaroslav Yurchishin, who brought up sternenko’s glorious history in the maidan self-defense.
Suprun never missed a protest in support of the rightwing neoliberals she so loved. On 4 November 2019, there was a protest in honur of the year-old acid killing of Ekaterina Gandzyuk, anti-corruption activist and acting mayor of Kherson. This is a cause de celebre of the anti-Avakov liberal nationalists, with ‘who killed Katya Gandzyuk’ graffiti covering Kiev to this day. Sternenko, Suprun, leader of the ‘Center for the Prevention of Corruption’ Vitaly Shabunin (I have written about his conflict with Zelensky here), and Poroshenkite former minister of justice Yury Lutsenko all appearing. Sternenko and Suprun also made a joint appearance at the courthouse where the Poroshenko-era minister of infrastructure was being judged for corruption.
The literary front
Suprun also released a book in December 2020 where she compared herself with an alien. Suprun clearly has the usual Ukrainian diaspora attitude, according to which the majority of Ukrainians are brainwashed Soviet zombies in need of harsh parenting from the englightened diaspora. The back cover was also adorned with a drawing of a ‘superbrain’ with husband Marko’s face. Predictably, the book was mainly her whining about the evil USSR:
Politicians who want me to fold my hands and stop working are striving to bring back the old corrupt system of healthcare. These are the people who want to continue seeing Ukraine as Soviet [while written in Ukrainian, she uses the Russian word for ‘Soviet’, but in Ukrainian letters[. Those who aim to share power among themselves to satisfy their own mercantile interests. Because that is exactly what the "sovok" does—it spreads Russian chauvinism, turning free people into slaves.
Unfortunately for Ukraine’s patriots, Suprun declared in early 2021 that she would no longer post on facebook, after which she deleted the page:
I want to give you one last piece of advice:
Ukrainians - are undefeatable.
Engage in conflict and do not compromise with evil.
Shortly after, she closed three organizations (‘Zakhist Patriotiv’, which means Defense of Patriots, ‘Peitriot Defens’, which is what it sounds like, and ‘Kiev Cultural Club’) she had set up to help veterans of the ‘anti-terrorist operation’ and ‘activists’ like Sternenko. ‘Zakhist Patriotiv’ trained ATO soldiers in tactical medicine and gave them NATO standard first aid kids.
But plenty of Suprun’s organizations, which have various links to figures in the US and Baltic countries, still exist. For instance, Ark.ua, which ‘is concerned with the mental and psychological health of Ukrainians’. No doubt. Also remaining is ‘Babylon-13’, which produces propagandistic ‘documentary films’ on foreign and state budget money.
The Information Front
Suprun didn’t just use her facebook page and literary output to whine about malicious Russian/Soviet disinfo. When Ukrainian media site strana.ua published an investigation шnto how the Kiev city council-funded ‘City Guard’ (MunVarta) organization was filled with open neo-nazis (I wrote about MunVarta here), Suprun’s website Stopfake declared this to be fake news.
This, despite the fact that mayor Klitchko himself stated that members of MunVarta would be checking documents on public transport alongside police officers. StopFake was mainly concerned with combating the idea that MunVarta were neo-nazis. According to StopFake, they are merely war veterans who want to help with rule of law in the capital. I wrote a whole article about MunVarta and its members here, mainly based on strana’s articles. You can judge for yourself the extent to which you would like your city’s rule of law be maintained by these patriots.
One of the reasons why StopFake was angry at strana was for the latter’s claim that Ukraine’s police refused to work with MunVarta because of how racist it was. In fact, this is a claim made openly by Yuriy Zozulya, the head of Kiev’s police, in 2018. Zozulya stated ‘We cannot work with racists’, citing the presence of C14 members in MunVarta and their recent attacks on Roma encampments.
StopFake wasn’t just a website. It also became the main fact-checker on facebook on March 26, 2020. That means that any content it judges to be ‘fake’ is removed or lowered down in the newsfeed. StopFake is sponsored by the following:
StopFake attacked Strana for criticizing neo-nazis at the same time as it received its position at facebook.
One of the neo-nazis of the infamous C14 group, Serj Mazur, was photographed as a member of the MunVarta as they stopped passengers to check documents in Kiev public transport during the Covid quarantine. Sergei Bondar, a neo-nazi from Svoboda I wrote about here, also participated. It was strana’s reporting on this story that earned StopFake’s ire. In 2018, Mazur had been arrested for violent attacks on Roma encampments in Kiev. He is described as a ‘neo-nazi activist’ by the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, which is itself an organization which tends towards apologetics for Ukraine’s far right.
C14 had been responsible for the death of one young Roma man and the injury of three others, including children, in a recent previous attack in western Ukraine. Notably, Mazur claimed that the Kiev city government had asked for their ‘help’ in ‘dealing with’ Roma. Mazur was supported as a brave young ‘activist’ by Sergei Lutsenko, EuroMaidan leader who became minister of justice under Poroshenko. According to Lutsenko, attacks on Mazur came from foreign ‘neo-Marxist’ organizations.
Bellingcat journalist Mark Colbourne was also quite worried about Suprun’s new role in StopFake:
Marko Suprun, Ulyana’s husband, was indeed quite an active face of StopFake:
Marko Suprun was photographed with Arseniy Bilobud at the September 2017 ‘International Nationalist Congress’. Asides from Sokyra Peruna, the fash(ion) brand Bilobud owns is called ‘Sva-stone’.
After a 2018 concert, Ukrainian police launched a criminal investigation into Sokyra Peruna for using swasticas and fascist references, including a Mussolini quote. Naturally, little came out of hte investigation.
In any case, the reason why StopFake was chosen by Facebook is quite logical, as Canadian-Ukrainian professor Katchanovski explains:
Naturally, Kruk fiercely defended Suprun whenever she got the chance:
No longer in Ukraine, Marko and Ulyana are hard at work campaigning for the correct Ukraine policies in the US. As usual, it is the person who violated Ukrainian law by holding a ministerial post as a dual citizen that shouts the loudest about defense of Ukrainian sovereignty.
And while the Supruns have retreated from their beloved, if insufficiently Atlanticist Ukraine, proteges of hers like Prytula and Sternenko certainly remain. Hopefully some future articles will dive deeper into their exciting adventures.