‘WW3 is Game On’
Azov intelligence chief speaks at inaugural military technology conference by new venture capital firm betting big on WW3
It was one month ago that “Dimitos,” a former fighter in the volunteer Azov Battalion, and now the head of intelligence for the Azov Brigade, spoke at the inaugural “MITS Forum” in Kyiv dedicated to “Ukrainian Defense Tech as a Partner for Pax Americana.” A couple days ago, he posted pictures of himself driving a sports car in western Ukraine, including one that appeared to show him going 145 miles per hour.
A new, high-powered venture capital firm organized the event. MITS Capital is named after a Ukrainian word for “might” that sounds like “meat.” According to the founders, World War III is already underway. Their website explains, they are making a one-of-a-kind “bet … that the free world will make a comeback to at least hold the line.” As the situation on the battlefield deteriorates, the American behind MITS is evidently growing more frantic about declaring World War III to protect their investments in “Ukrainian weapons start-ups.”
The most high-powered partner, H. Perry Boyle, Jr. of Ketchum, Idaho, says they are “drinking from the fire hydrant” in Ukraine, because “we have literally no competition.” He used to be a “top lieutenant” of the notorious hedge-funder manager Steve Cohen, now the owner of the New York Mets, whose insider trading scandal inspired the TV show Billions.
Boyle advises the Center for a New American Security, an influential think tank with strong ties to some of the biggest war hawks in Washington, especially those in the Democratic Party. These days he’s warning his LinkedIn followers (increasingly often) that World War III is “game on,” and “we are losing.” But have no fear: there is only a 1% chance the conflict goes nuclear. Boyle has even said that Washington should let Israel “take care of itself,” so the U.S. can “pivot to Ukraine.”
Of his Ukrainian partners, one (Anton Melnyk) is Kyiv’s former “Head of Tech Ecosystem” who helped to unblock the Azov movement from Meta platforms, and the other (Denys Gurak) follows me on Twitter/X, where I almost exclusively post about the Ukrainian far-right.
To usher in 2017, Anton Melnyk joined a torch-lit march in Kyiv that commemorated the 108th anniversary of the birth of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. Some Nazis chanted “Jews out,” in German. From 2020–23, he worked for the Ministry of Digital Transformation and its Ukrainian Startup Fund. In that capacity, after reportedly leading the Ministry’s efforts to help the National Guard’s notorious neo-Nazi unit get back on Instagram and Facebook, Melnyk promoted a state-sponsored propaganda video about the Azov Brigade for the English-speaking world.
Melnyk left his post in late 2023 to co-found MITS Capital in early 2024. A few weeks ago, he warned, “World War III is coming. No. World War III is probably happening now. So forget about a peaceful liberal life for children in Western countries, they will be fighting for the mistakes of weak irresponsible leaders.” Likewise, his partner Boyle said a couple weeks ago, “War is not coming. War is here. It is escalating. The only question to be answered: Is Democracy worth defending?”
Around the time of the first MITS Forum in October, Perry Boyle predicted that “Ukraine is only just beginning its strikes deep into Russia,” even if the United States refuses to provide long-range weapons. “We at MITS Capital have invested in several companies providing this capability to Ukraine. Expect to see deep strikes at an accelerating rate.” More recently, he declared on LinkedIn, “The war will not be settled until Ukraine brings the war to Moscow. That will begin after the US election.” This post was “liked” by someone who works in the Presidential Office in Ukraine.
Azov officer “Dimitos,” or Dmytro Pavlenko-Kryzheshevsky, joined the first panel discussion at the inaugural MITS Forum, and signed a Russian Lancet kamikaze drone which was auctioned off to Perry Boyle. “I look forward to mounting it above the mantel in my living room,” he said. Liudmyla Dolhonovska — who advised the former commander-in-chief (Valery Zaluzhny) on “strategic communications,” and now advises MITS Capital — moderated the first panel with “Dimitos,” the Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation (Oleksandr Bornyakov), the Deputy Commander of the Logistics Forces (Volodymyr Kypriy), the CEO of a Ukrainian drone company, and the “Queen of Drones,” according to Boyle.
Forbes held the third panel discussion, with two moderators: the chief editor of Forbes Ukraine, and Katya Soldak, the New York-based editorial director of Forbes Media’s international editions. In January 2023, she moderated a panel at Ukraine House Davos, an annual World Economic Forum side-event, featuring Azov intelligence officer “Gandalf” (Illia Samoilenko). “One year ago things like this were unimaginable,” he commented online. “I don’t believe in any holocaust, it’s just a story,” he told a journalist in 2017.
Soldak and “Gandalf” were reunited at the 2023 Yalta European Strategy conference. Earlier this year, Forbes Ukraine held its first “Money for Victory” conference in Kyiv. Azov Brigade officer “Lemko” (Arsen Dmytryk), the commander of its 6th battalion, and a former football hooligan turned balaclava-clad “revolutionary” in 2014, was a panelist at this event. A couple months ago, Forbes Ukraine welcomed him back on stage as one of its “30 Under 30” picks for 2024.
“Lemko” brought a friend from his unit to the “Money for Victory” event — Azov military historian Roman Ponomarenko, according to whom the “Galicia Division” of the Nazi Waffen-SS was “the most motivated and well-trained Ukrainian military formation of the 20th century.” Ponomarenko’s “area of expertise” is “World War II and Ukrainian formations in the German armed forces,” but he also runs a neo-Confederate Facebook page dedicated to the U.S. Civil War.
A few days after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Ponomarenko’s page shared a post from a biker in Arkansas who identified Ukraine with the Lost Cause: “rewind the clock 161 years and we have the same exact situation occurring in 1861 between the newly proclaimed sovereign and free Confederate States of America and the country they were formerly a part of, the United States of America. The C.S.A. was invaded by a foreign power bent on denying them their rights of self determination and freedom to choose their own path and destiny.”
Stacie Pettyjohn, a senior fellow and director of the “defense program” at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), moderated the fourth of five panels at the MITS Forum. Pettyjohn, a veteran of the RAND Corporation, joined the Biden administration’s defense transition team in 2020. Victoria Nuland, one of the most powerful people in the State Department (2021–24), was formerly the CEO of CNAS (2018–19). The current CEO has said that “Putin’s claim about fighting Nazis today goes beyond historical farce.” Michele Flourney, who co-founded CNAS (2007), also co-founded WestExec Advisors (2017) with Tony Blinken, which had an even bigger revolving door with the Biden administration. But according to CNAS advisor Perry Boyle, the 2024 election was simply “between an appeaser and an isolationist.”
“I believe that Ukraine’s membership in NATO will put an end to the war,” said one of the panelists, Yulia Marushevska, who leads the Reforms Support Office in the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. Some may recall Marushevska as the star of the viral 2014 video, “I Am a Ukrainian.” Her co-panelist, MITS supervisory board member Ernest J. Herold, a former deputy assistant secretary general of NATO for defense investment, said that “fears of provocation by offering membership are probably unfounded.”
My message to Ukraine is just hang in there, hang in there a little bit longer and hopefully things will go the way I think they will and we’ll see a good outcome.
According to Perry Boyle, this event “brought together around 300 government officials, leading experts, military personnel, Ukrainian mil-tech companies, start-ups and investors.” Furthermore, the “MITS team, together with the American Chamber of Ukraine, American University of Kyiv and Brand Ukraine, is also developing an Open Letter to the future US President with key recommendations and strategic proposals for the development of the US-Ukraine defense partnership.”
Meanwhile, Politico published a story titled, “Ukraine’s weapons industry presses government to allow arms exports.” In July, Breaking Defense reported, “Ukraine’s startups want to export to the West, but Kyiv is standing in the way.” The article quoted Perry Boyle, who complained, “It’s really dumb to invest in Ukraine.”
“Your companies get air raids, you know, they’re operating in an active war zone. But the key reason is you only have one customer, which is the Ukrainian government. … You have a batch-order single purchaser who will not let you have another customer — like, that’s dumb. I spend a lot of time talking with the ministries. If you want to attract real capital into your country to scale up warfighting production, you have to change this,” he says, claiming that the Ministry of Defense is the primary driver of the ban. “The problem is, it’s the army against every other ministry right now.”
“They should be creating a Silicon Valley for defense innovation,” Boyle said in July. “So far, we’ve seen zero interest from traditional venture capitals in putting a dollar into Ukraine,” he told the Kyiv Independent in September. The latter noted that Boyle “freely acknowledges that it’s a risk-on approach that’s anathema to most foreign investors.” That month, MITS Capital announced the launch of the “MITS Accelerator,” and said it was raising $50 million to support Ukrainian weapons startups that completed its “15-week boot camp.” By comparison, foreign investment in this category was less than $10 million over the past year.
Denys Gurak, the founding partner of MITS Capital who is apparently familiar with my research, has been a senior fellow at the Washington-based Potomac Foundation since 2018. Phillip Karber, its president, is a friend of the “Bandera Lobby” that sits on the MITS Capital supervisory board. Karber is allegedly dating his assistant who is also a member of the OUN-B, or the “Banderite” faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which still exists. She has said that I “started the Russian propaganda that led to this war.”
Aside from Ernest J. Herold, the MITS Capital supervisory board also consists of some former executives at Lockheed Martin (Monique Brown and Alan Merbaum) and BlackRock (David Bonfili), and Google’s former Country Director for Ukraine and Eastern Europe (Dmytro Sholomko). MITS Capital asks, “Is there any better opportunity in the world today to ‘buy the cannons, sell the trumpets’ than Ukraine”? Here they are paraphrasing an alleged Rothschild quote about buying at the start of war, and selling when it’s over. Some 90 years ago, retired U.S. Marine Corps major general Smedley Butler better explained that “War is a Racket.”
It always has been. … A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. … It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.
A few months before Putin launched his “special military operation,” Boyle reportedly went “scorched earth” in his failed bid to become a small-town mayor in Ketchum, Idaho. “It is hard to see people with so much money, so new to town, think they know what is best, when they only know what is good for them and their small circle of friends,” said a local. “The crazy thing is he and his supporters live in this bubble and have no clue as to the work and the life of people working day-to-day,” according to someone else from Ketchum. “I know friends who are in the hedge-fund business,” he told a reporter. “They think the whole world is changeable for the sake of their profit. That’s how they think, period. There are no rules.”
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