The editors of the eajc.org website held a small investigation on the person calling himself Meir Landau, who had been hysterically calling to help Ukrainian Jewry against nationalists and their pogroms on behalf of the non-existent “Jewish Fighting Units.” This “Meir Landau” turned out to be an activist of a pro-Russian group of Cossaks, Nikolai Tselytsky.

It is difficult to say whether he actually has any relation to the Jews. According to Tselytsky’s own statement, Landau is his great-grandmother’s surname, but whether this is true or not it is currently impossible to check.

Nikolai Tselytsky was born in 1976 and currently lives in Chuguev (Kharkiv region).

The most interesting thing about this man with an interesting fate is that most of his creative life had been somehow connected with pro-Russian Cossacks. According to his own words, he had been a member of the Pridnestrov’ye Cossack Guard in 1992-1993 (which is, naturally, hard to believe considering his age). From 1993 (that is, since he was 17) until 2003, our hero worked at the Department of Planning, Analytics, and Summary Book-Keeping of the Cossack Union of Russia, was part of the Kharkiv Fraternity of Russian Cossacks (from 2003 to 2012). Since 2009 he has been the proud Director General of the General A. P. Kutepov International Charity Foundation (Kharkiv). Besides all this, Tselytsky has also talked about himself many times and has called himself a variety of other thing. Among other interesting ideas, he says that he is a reserve officer, a Senior Lieutenant, who formerly worked in the police and “fought against extremism in Ukraine.”

But Tselytsky is known to many people of Kharkiv oblast’, Chuguyev city, as “Kolya Ganja” (that is, Kolya Marijuana). It is also said that he had not only been a Cossack, but an activist of Ukrainian patriotic and nationalistic organizations, from “Prosvita” to far more radical nationalistic political groups.

And such a man has been spreading hysterical lies about how it is necessary to evacuate all of Ukraine’s Jews in the face of the “nationalistic Nazi threat”, and had been quoted by many media from Russia to Israel.

The eajc.org website does not know whether Tselitsky-Landau is a conscious and cynical provocateur or just a man whose fantasy life got the better of him. But nonetheless, the media who had been so quick to reprint the panicking and provocative statements by “a number of Ukrainian Jewish organizations” should not have made up titles like “Jews of Ukraine Calling for Help!”, but instead taken a sliver of time to check their information.