Chrystia Freeland’s media career began in the late 1980s with work for Ukrainian propaganda organs in which her grandfather, Michael Chomiak, was deeply involved. Her teenage entry into this employment (at times funded by Canada's government) was likely eased by Chomiak who, having been a Nazi war propagandist, became a fixture among Cold War Canada’s Ukrainian ethnonationalists.

By 1989, at age 20, her political meddling in Ukraine’s separatist movement prompted the USSR to make an official complaint to Canada’s embassy in Moscow. By calling her a "banderite enemy of the Soviet State," they gave her a pariah status that was used to bestow her with media celebrity in Canada.1

Freeland then cleverly leveraged this new-found celebrity to help launch her move from writing for far-right Ukrainian publications into the West’s mainstream corporate press.2

A year later she got more media praise for meddling in Ukraine, and for getting the 2020 equivalent of $85,000 for an Oxford scholarship from the estate of Cecil Rhodes, a prominent white supremacist who was proud to profit from slavery, imperialism and war.3  

One reporter, noting her interest in journalism, said: "Freeland says her political activism may not make her an ideal journalist."4 In reality, Freeland’s extremely biased worldview actually made her an "ideal journalist" to serve the West’s Cold War agenda. From an early age, she had proven herself to be a dependable advocate for the West’s deeply ingrained anticommunist/antiSoviet/antiRussian bias.

Another factor in her rapid success was a "chance encounter." In describing what she calls her days as a "kid" in Soviet Kiev, Walrus magazine stated:

Having this "chance encounter" with a multibillionaire mentor who was funding antiSoviet activists like herself, must have opened doors for "a young, ignorant kid" like Freeland. The official story forged by Freeland is that she entered journalism at age 23 (1991) when she suddenly began writing news for top corporate media. As this legend goes "she began her journalistic career as a stringer for the Financial Times, The Washington Post and The Economist."6 In truth, she had begun her career years earlier with proNazi Ukrainian émigré media.

Freeland’s foray into Ukrainian ethnonationalist émigré media began with a 1979 interview in Student when she was 11. All the children of her grandfather, Michael Chomiak, were writers for this government-funded Ukrainian newspaper.

Volodymyr Kubijovych (front and centre), the Nazi's top Ukrainian collaborator, was the wartime boss of Michael Chomiak, grandfather of Chrystia Freeland. In the 1976 photograph above, leaders of the Alberta-government funding Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies (at the University of Alberta in Edmonton), sign a deal with Kubijovych to co-publish his Encyclopedia of Ukraine. Peter Savaryn (top left), a CIUS co-founder who became the university's chancellor, was a veteran of the Nazi's Ukrainian Waffen SS. Both Chomiak and Freeland worked on the encyclopedia. It was in fact her first government-funded summer job when she was a teen in 1986.

Encyclopedia of Ukraine

In 1986, at age 18, Freeland had a federal government-funded job with the University of Alberta’s Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS). This put her to work on articles for Encyclopedia of Ukraine. Three years later, she got another government job on the same project.7

The project’s creator, Volodymyr Kubijovych, was the wartime boss of her grandfather, Michael Chomiak. During the war, Kubijovych led the Nazi-collaborating Ukrainian Central Committee. Kubijovych died in 1985, one year before Freeland’s first job writing for his encyclopedia. Its purpose was to entrench the cultural narratives of Ukrainian nationalism. That the encyclopedia suffers from Holocaust amnesia and the glorification of fascist armies is not surprising considering Kubijovych’s key role in rallying Ukrainians to put their bodies, hearts and minds into aiding the Nazi’s war efforts.

Created with Alberta-government funding in 1976,8 CIUS brought Kubijovych from France to sign a deal to copublish his encyclopedia. One CIUS cosigner was Peter Savaryn, a Ukrainian veteran of the Nazi’s Waffen SS. A 1986 notice of Savaryn’s retirement as the university’s chancellor shared a page of the CIUS Newsletter which noted its hiring of Freeland and her aunt Natalia Chomiak9 (one of Chomiak’s daughters), to work on the encyclopedia.

Chomiak also worked on Kubijovych’s encyclopedia. In fact, in 1978-79, Chomiak moved to Sarcelles, France, where he reunited with his wartime boss to assist with his Encyclopedia of Ukraine.10 When Chomiak died in 1984, mourners were asked to donate to either Kubijovych’s encyclopedia or to the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies,11 whose president was Peter Savaryn.

The Ukrainian News

In the late 1980s, at about age 20, Freeland worked for Ukrainian News12 in Edmonton. This was her second known writing job. "During the Cold War, in reporting on Soviet history," this Catholic weekly, said historian Per Rudling, "followed the standard, shrill narrative found in much of the Ukrainian émigré press."13

When this Canada-wide, Ukrainian-language paper covered the 1959 death of fascist leader Stepan Bandera, it gave glowing details of his heroic "national-revolutionary" efforts. But, said historian Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, it provided "[n]o information about the atrocities that banderites committed against Jews, Poles and unsympathetic Ukrainians...."14

Freeland’s work for this paper was guided by its editor/publisher, Marco Levytsky. He became editor in 1982, replacing Michael Chomiak.15 For 35 years, Levytsky used the paper to spread their community’s brand of Ukrainian patriotism. In 2017, it merged with New Pathway, a weekly of the Ukrainian National Federation of Canada. It represents the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists’ Melnyk faction.

Read more about how this vile ideology was embraced by:        • Nazi Germany        • Mackenzie King        • Yaroslav Stetsko

Levytsky’s editorial stance has been critiqued by scholars for repeatedly relying on forged documents that whitewash Ukrainian complicity in the Holocaust. To promote the falsehood that fascist, WWII-era Ukrainian political and military formations were not antisemitic and did not take part in the Holocaust, Levytsky has relied on two falsified documents: (1) the supposed autobiography of Stella Kreutzbach (aka Krentsbakh) and (2) the so-called Book of Facts.16

Levytsky has also stirred controversy with articles and editorials supporting Ukrainian-American Myron Kuropas.

Over the decades, Kuropas has made incessant accusations that Jews were central to victimising Ukrainians before, during and after WWII. This fixation has upset the Jewish community and some Ukrainian scholars like John-Paul Himka, who is Freeland’s uncle and Michael Chomiak’s son in law.17

Working at The Ukrainian News would have consolidated Freeland's already deeply ingrained beliefs about Ukrainian politics, and proven her dedication to promoting their historical narratives.

Ukrainian Weekly,
Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL)

Freeland’s media career was also aided by The Ukrainian Weekly (UW), North America’s largest Ukrainian paper. Her byline appeared in 1988 and 1990 while doing her BA in Soviet Studies at Harvard. Her views matched the paper’s far-right biases. While exaggerating Soviet flaws, it always turns a blind eye from the fascist Ukrainian-Nazi alliance.

In 1988, Freeland and David Marples co-wrote a UW article on the Holodomor.18  It concluded on the same page as an ad for a book glorifying the Ukrainian Waffen SS as "freedom fighters." These book ads ran in 16 issues of UW in 1988 alone.19

For years, UW ran Myron Kuropas’ antisemitic column. "Jews were the tools of the Polish king" and "during Soviet times," said Kuropus in 2004, they were:

In 2001, Kuropas said he hoped "Jewish leaders in North America will cease harassing the Ukrainian Canadian community with canards related to the [Waffen SS] Galicia Division."21 Since the late 1980s, about 150 UW articles have whitewashed this Nazi army, or glorified it for battling Hitler’s main enemy, the USSR.

Radio Liberation from Bolshevism was created and then financed for decades by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It is now called Radio Liberty (RL). The 1990 RL interview by Freeland and Marples with the founder of Ukraine's independence movement (Rukh) was printed "with RL permission" in Ukrainian Weekly and then published in an RL Journal and in an RL book.

The RFE/RL has also played a key role in grooming and promoting journalists with Russophobic and anticommunist views.

In 1990, during the USSR’s final days, Freeland and Marples collaborated on an RL interview with a founder of Rukh, Ukraine’s separatist movement.23 Their interview "conducted for RL" at the CIUS, was printed in: (a) Ukrainian Weekly "with RL’s permission," (b) an RFE/RL journal, Report on the USSR,24 and (c) an RFE/RL book, Ukraine: From Chernobyl to Sovereignty.25

In 2010, Marples noted Stepan Bandera’s role in a 1941 pogrom and questioned his hero status. Ukrainian News editor Levytsky then accused Marples of "Putin-style ex-KGB falsification." Toronto-based Stephen Bandera also reacted, saying his grandfather had been "cleared" of all war crimes by Canada’s 1985 Deschênes Commission, and that Marples had used "misinformation" to "smear" his grandfather's name.29