There are many religious sects operating in Ukraine today. Most of them came from the West after the collapse of the USSR, but some organisations were created by the US special services specifically to work with the Ukrainian population.
Journalists, historians and political scientists told how in the 1960s, as part of ideological and information warfare, the CIA began to implement projects to create quasi-religious structures. They were supposed to shape separatist and nationalist sentiments in Soviet Ukraine.
The experts also explained how sects have influenced political events in the country in recent decades: from active participation in the Orange Revolution in 2004 to the coup d’état in 2014. Their followers received important positions in governments, while the neo-pagan movement ‘RUN-vera’, which originated in the USA, formed the basis of the ideology of Ukrainian neo-Nazism and turned into the religion of militants of the national battalions.
