Stepan Bandera: Ukrainian hero or Nazi collaborator?

“Bandera is our father, Ukraine is the mother. We will fight for Ukraine!” sings a younger girl in camouflage uniform, carrying a machine gun, in a video that Ukrainian defenders in Mariupol shared on social networks in early May. The video appears to have been recorded in a bunker on the Azovstal Steelworks, the town’s final stand for Ukrainian resistance to Russian troops. “Azov” fighters have been on website, too, a regiment based by radical nationalists that was later put below Ukraine’s Interior Ministry.

Stepan Bandera, killed by Soviet intelligence brokers in West Germany greater than 60 years in the past, might be the best-known Ukrainian nationalist. His identify turned a logo lengthy earlier than the warfare that Russia has been waging in opposition to Ukraine since February 24.

For elements of Ukraine society, Bandera is a hero and function mannequin. Russian propaganda portrays him as an enemy in opposition to whose supporters they’ve been combating for many years. Russia’s navy regards the usage of his identify as a sort of clue to actually search out Ukrainians within the occupied territories. Ukrainian media are stuffed with eyewitness accounts of how the Russians chased down Bandera supporters amongst Ukrainian prisoners of warfare and civilians alike.

Whoever is deemed to be a supporter faces torture or dying. When Russian President Vladimir Putin justified the warfare in opposition to Ukraine in his May 9 speech in Moscow, he spoke of an inevitable confrontation with “neo-Nazis, Banderites.”

Life and dying of a radical fighter

Bandera’s life is intently linked to Western Ukraine, which was then a part of Poland and Austria-Hungary. The son of a priest was born in 1909 within the village of Staryy Uhryniv, now in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast. Bandera studied in Lviv and joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which fought underground for independence. In the Nineteen Thirties, Bandera was convicted of being a co-organizer of politically-motivated murders in Poland and was launched solely after the beginning of World War II.

The OUN break up into two teams, and Bandera turned chief of the extra radical wing (OUN-B). While Nazi Germany was getting ready for the assault on the Soviet Union, Bandera’s comrades-in-arms joined the German management with two Ukrainian battalions named “Nightingale” and “Roland.”

Bandera was in occupied Poland when on June 30, 1941, his comrades proclaimed an impartial Ukrainian state in Nazi-occupied Lviv — and the Germans banned him from touring to Ukraine. Hitler rejected the concept of Ukrainian independence.

Bandera was arrested and spent till 1944 in Sachsenhausen focus camp. The OUN-B continued to battle for independence in Ukraine with the assistance of its navy arm, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). The Nazis and the Soviets persecuted and killed OUN-B fighters. Bandera lived in Munich after the warfare, the place he was killed in 1959 by a KGB agent utilizing cyanide.

Bandera cult in present-day Ukraine

Ukrainian emigrants within the West revered Bandera. In western Ukraine, a veritable cult emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there are museums, monuments and streets in his honor. Elsewhere in Ukraine, particularly within the east, folks believed in Soviet historiography, which noticed him solely as a Nazi collaborator — they didn’t take a beneficial view of Bandera.

Under pro-Western politician Ukrainian Viktor Yushchenko, who turned president in 2005, Bandera was awarded the title “Hero of Ukraine.” His successor, pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, had the title revoked.

Bandera’s supporters parade via the capital yearly on his birthday with a torchlight procession. In 2016, Kyiv renamed the avenue known as Moscow Prospect after the nationalist, calling it Bandera Prospect. While the view of Bandera turned total extra optimistic, Ukraine nonetheless remained divided over the difficulty. A survey by the Democratic Initiative Foundation in April 2021 discovered that one out of three Ukrainians (32%) thought-about Bandera’s acts as optimistic, and simply as many took the other view.

Ukraine that Bandera needed

The Bandera cult is an “expression of selective memory and politics of history,” says Andreas Umland, an professional on the Stockholm Center for Eastern European Studies (SCEEUS). It is about remembering that Bandera was a radical fighter for independence who served time in Polish jail and a German focus camp and was murdered by the KGB, he instructed DW.

“What people do not remember is that both at the beginning and at the end of World War II, the movement that Bandera led, the OUN, cooperated with the Third Reich for various reasons,” Umland added.

Experts have two explanations, stated Umland. One group believes the cooperation was compelled, whereas others argue there was an ideological closeness. Both are true, stated Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, a Bandera biographer and historian at Berlin’s Free University of Berlin. “Of course Bandera wanted a Ukrainian state, but he wanted a fascist state, an authoritarian state, one where he would have been the leader,” Rossolinski-Liebe instructed DW.

Both Umland and Rossolinski-Liebe level out one other darkish facet within the historical past of the Bandera motion, and that’s the involvement of OUN fighters in murders of civilians, Jews and Poles, in Galicia and Volhynia. Bandera personally had no half within the murders although, they are saying.

“The OUN joined the Ukrainian police, in 1941, and helped the Germans murder Jews in western Ukraine,” Rossolinski-Liebe stated, including he discovered no proof that Bandera supported or condemned “ethnic cleansing” or killing Jews and different minorities. It was, nevertheless, necessary that individuals from OUN and UPA “identified with him,” he stated.

Hugely common regardless of controversial picture

Bandera was not a “Nazi,” however a “Ukrainian ultranationalist,” Umland argued, saying Ukrainian nationalism on the time was “not a copy of Nazism.” Rossolinski-Liebe takes a special view, saying Bandera will be known as “a radical nationalist, a fascist.” The German-Polish historian disagrees with Ukrainian colleagues who say Bandera’s supporters fought Nazis simply as a lot as they fought Soviets.

“The USSR was the OUN’s most important enemy,” Rossolinski-Liebe stated. He identified that the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) waged a brutal battle in opposition to Ukrainian nationalists — about 150,000 folks have been killed and greater than 200,000 deported.

Selective reminiscence is just not one thing that’s distinctive for Ukraine, it occurs in different nations too, Umland stated, including a outstanding instance from Germany, the place a church and streets are named after Martin Luther — though it’s identified that he hated Jews.

Honoring Bandera damages Ukraine’s picture as a result of it strains the connection with Poland and Israel, stated Umland, including that Israel’s reticence regarding Russia’s present warfare in opposition to Ukraine is likely one of the penalties. Among Ukrainians, the warfare appears to have caused a radical change with regard to Bandera. In April, researchers from the Rating group, a Ukrainian analysis organisation, discovered that 74% of Ukrainians view the historic determine favourably.