The ghosts of Ukraine’s past

‘Zelensky has proven that Ukraine is not ready to be part of the European family,’ an angry Polish President Karol Nawrocki told journalists, adding that he was considering stripping Zelensky of Poland’s highest state honour, the Order of the White Eagle. Former Polish President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Lech Wałęsa announced he was withdrawing support for Zelensky and would be removing the Ukrainian flag pin from his chest. ‘By honouring bandits… the president of Ukraine has insulted me and all our massacred compatriots,’ he said. And Krzysztof Bosak, Deputy Speaker of the Sejm, Poland’s parliament, threatened to withdraw from EU-negotiated loans to Ukraine, as well as suspend payments for Starlink satellite systems.

The man Zelensky honoured as a ‘Ukrainian hero’ was Andrei Melnyk, whose body was returned from Luxembourg and reburied in Kyiv with full military honours. He is considered a hero of the anti-Russian resistance by many Ukrainians but a war criminal and Nazi collaborator by most Poles. In fact, Melnyk was both.

The ideology, career and war crimes of Melnyk is rooted – along with that of his more radical rivals, Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych – in the chaotic aftermath of the First World War. After the collapse of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and German empires the first ever fragile Ukrainian state emerged from the rubble. But the national aspirations of the Ukrainians were ignored at the Versailles Peace Conference and the fledgling Ukraine was soon occupied from the west by the armies of the new-born Polish state, reappearing on the map of Europe for the first time since the Russo-Prussian-Austrian partition of 1795. Polish forces under Józef Piłsudski, a former revolutionary socialist and founder of the armed Polish legions against Russia in the First World War, briefly occupied Kyiv in 1920 before being pushed back by Bolshevik forces. But Poland successfully carved off Volhynia and eastern Galicia – the whole of modern Western Ukraine, including Lviv – and ruthlessly interned over 70,000 Ukrainian nationalists. A 1930 New York Herald Tribune dispatch documenting the ‘pacification’ of Ukrainian villages reported that peasants were flogged ‘sixty or ninety blows from the knout’, Ukrainian cultural institutions destroyed, priests forced to cry ‘Long live Piłsudski!’ on pain of being ‘flogged until they are made unconscious’.

It was in opposition to Polish occupation first, and Soviet second, that the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists was founded by a group of young Ukrainians – including Andrei Melnyk – in Vienna in 1929. Throughout the 1930s the OUN conducted sabotage and assassinations in Polish-ruled Galicia, including the Polish Interior Minister Bronisław Pieracki, killed in an operation organised by Stepan Bandera in June 1934. Bandera was caught and imprisoned by the Poles and the OUN’s founding leader Colonel Yevhen Konovalets was assassinated by Soviet agents in Rotterdam in 1938. Melnyk was elected head of the OUN at its conference in Rome – sponsored as a useful anti-Communist resistance force by the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini – the following year.

With the outbreak of war Ukrainian nationalists found a more powerful sponsor in Nazi Germany. Bandera, released from Polish prison, personally made a deal with the leaders of German Abwehr military intelligence in February 1941 to form two battalions of special operations forces from his supporters. The Nachtigall or ‘Nightingale’ and Roland battalions were two approximately 600-strong military units uniformed and equipped by the Wehrmacht, and formally attached to German Army Group South for the invasion of the Soviet Union. In April 1941 the OUN-B – the faction headed by Bandera – held its Second Grand Assembly in Nazi-occupied Kraków. There the movement passed resolutions that resolved that ‘the Jews in the USSR constitute the most faithful support of the ruling Bolshevik regime, and the vanguard of Muscovite imperialism in Ukraine’. The same assembly produced operational instructions for the planned ‘Ukrainian National Revolution’, authorising the killing of Jews, Poles, and Russians deemed hostile to the Ukrainian national cause.

Nachtigall forces, in German uniform, entered Lviv, on 30 June 1941 but soon rebelled against the Abwehr’s control. Bandera’s deputy Yaroslav Stetsko announced a ‘national assembly’ in the old Prosvita building and proclaimed a ‘Sovereign All-Ukrainian State’ from the city radio station. Both leaders were quickly arrested by the Gestapo and spent the rest of the war in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Melnyk, for his part, maintained a more constructive attitude towards collaboration with Ukraine’s new German masters. His more moderate OUN-M group sent expeditionary groups into central and eastern Ukraine and placed their cadres in the occupation administration. But this cooperation soon broke down as Germany tightened its control, and by the end of 1941 hundreds of OUN members were shot in Kyiv and other cities. Melnyk, too, was sent to Sachsenhausen.

With the German-OUN alliance shattered, the Ukrainian nationalists went underground and formed the Ukrainian Insurgent Army or UPA, with a distinctive black and red flag. Largely formed from Ukrainian deserters from German units, the UPA launched a series of bloody massacres in the former southwest Poland — which it saw as western Ukraine — targeting Jews and Poles. ‘The OUN-Bandera had long pledged to rid Ukraine of its national minorities,’ writes Serhiy Plokhiy in The Gates of Europe. ‘Its capacity to kill Poles depended upon German training, and its determination to kill Poles had much to do with its desire to clear the terrain of purported enemies before a final confrontation with the Red Army.’ On ‘Bloody Sunday’, 11 July 1943, the UPA attacked roughly 100 settlements around Parośla, murdering civilians with axes, knives and burning people to death in churches and barns. The Polish Institute of National Remembrance estimates the combined death toll of massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia at approximately 100,000.

Independently of the UPA the Germans continued to recruit Ukrainians into the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (‘Galizien’) and its associated police regiments. These troops, organised by district governor Otto von Wächter and approved by SS head Heinrich Himmler, massacred up to 1,500 Polish villagers in Huta Pieniacka on 28 February 1944 and rounded up tens of thousands of Jews to be sent for extermination. A former member of SS-Galizien, 98-year-old veteran Yaroslav Hunka, was given a standing ovation by the Canadian Parliament in 2023.

In independent Ukraine the memory of the UPA and its leaders has become a deeply controversial issue. Some 300,000 Ukrainians fought on the German side in the Great Patriotic War, while over seven million fought with the Soviets. The issue of memorials to Bandera divides the country on geographic lines. In 2013, support for recognition of the UPA as fighters for independence reached 94 per cent in Ternopil Oblast in Western Ukraine, but in Kharkiv Oblast in the east support for Bandera monuments stood at eight per cent in 2013, dropping to six per cent in 2015.

Zelensky, elected in 2019, never attempted the symbolic rehabilitation of OUN-UPA figures pursued by his predecessor Viktor Yushchenko, but neither did he systematically confront the western nationalist narrative. His Jewish identity and family history – with relatives killed in the Holocaust – make valorisation of OUN figures politically and morally fraught. In 2019 Zelensky called Bandera ‘a hero for a certain percentage of Ukrainians, and it’s normal’. But when in 2021 78 Ukrainian MPs formally petitioned Zelensky to restore the Hero of Ukraine awards to Bandera and Shukhevych, he declined.

Now, after four years of war, Zelensky’s position had changed. Glorification of the UPA may still be a minority position nationally – but it’s strongly supported by the part of Ukrainian society which is doing the fighting. Support is especially strong among the Azov movement, whose leaders have risen to senior command positions in the Ukrainian Army and who successfully lobbied Zelensky to name a unit of Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces ‘Heroes of the UPA’.

At the reburial of Melnyk – attended by the entire Ukrainian cabinet – Zelensky described Melnyk and his wife as ‘iconic Ukrainians of the 20th century who are deeply respected’, calling Melnyk and his followers ‘Ukrainian heroes’.

Poles, for obvious reasons, see the legacy of the UPA in very different terms. Poland’s president Nawrocki – a former head of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance – spoke of the ‘bandits and murderers from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army’. He stated that Zelensky’s honouring of Nazi collaborators ‘gives oxygen to Russian propaganda’ – a reference to Vladimir Putin’s stated war aim of ‘denazifying’ Ukraine.

Since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Poland has stood up as a leading champion of Ukraine, admitting over three million refugees and lobbying for EU military and financial support for Kyiv. The airport at Rzeszow and the border crossing at Przemsyl are key logistics hubs for western military equipment and a vital export route for Ukrainian grain. Alienating Poland comes with grave strategic costs for Zelensky – not least because Warsaw’s support is vital for Kyiv’s ambitions of fast-track EU membership. But the fortunes of war have made shoring up support among ultranationalist elements in the army more important to Zelensky, it seems, than relations with key allies and donors in the West.