2023-09-30 05:10:14
The incident between Volodomir Zelensky and Justin Trudeau – Prime Minister of Canada – in the Canadian parliament this week, when they applauded Yaroslav Hunka, a Ukrainian ex-combatant who was later revealed to be a member of the SS, generated criticism in many Western media. The old man was introduced at the event as “a fighter for Ukrainian independence against the Russians during World War II.”
A question to ask is, to what extent, those involved were unaware of the past of the honoree.
In the West, for decades, they magnified the role of the United States and Great Britain in the Nazi defeat and it is ignored that 80 percent of German troops were destroyed by the Soviets. Later, during the Cold War, the Soviets were assimilated to the Russians, which allowed the USSR to be presented as a State where other nations were subject to the Russians, seeking to generate rivalries between them. It was unknown that for much of Soviet history, its main leaders were non-Russian: Stalin was Georgian and Khrushchev and Brezhnev were Ukrainian. Furthermore, Canada was a refuge for a large number of Ukrainian collaborators who grouped together in the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, a very active association with an anti-communist and anti-Russian discourse.
Thus one could understand the ignorance of the Canadian leaders about the fact that the honoree, being a combatant against the Soviets – or the “Russians” – must have been on the side of the Nazis.
This historical ignorance cannot be attributed to Zelensky because the debate about the past has been going on for years in Ukraine, even under his government. Since before independence and then even longer, the role of Ukrainian nationalists in the war was discussed. Nazi collaborators were exalted as a legitimate opposition to communism because it would have been worse for the Ukrainians and any alliance was valid to defeat them. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), created in 1929 to achieve a Ukrainian State, was vindicated. This organization was later divided into two: one of them was led by Stepán Bandera. In Poland occupied by Germany, the Ukrainian nationalist battalions Nachtingall and Roland were formed in 1941, integrated into the German army to invade the USSR. There the battalion under the command of the Ukrainian Roman Shujevich organized the first massacre of Jews, before the Nazis themselves.
In 1942, Bandera’s OUN created the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) to fight the Soviets, Poles and Germans, and create their State. Although they later agreed with the Nazis to fight the Soviets. In 1943 they exterminated at least 80,000 Poles in Volyn to achieve an ethnically pure territory. Additionally, the OUN facilitated the recruitment of thousands of Ukrainians to create the 14th SS Division (known as Galitzia). With the Nazi defeat, most nationalists took refuge mainly in the US and Canada.
When the USSR collapsed, the OUN was legalized as the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists (KUN) party, which in 2005 was part of the alliance that brought Viktor Yushchenko to government. This began a campaign to rewrite the past and create a homogeneous identity to prevail over the existing multiculturalism; They sought to remove support from the pro-Russians who demanded the co-official status of the Russian language and autonomous provincial governments. The Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance was created and by law it was a crime to deny the character of the 1932 famine under Stalin as an anti-Ukrainian genocide. Shujevich was declared a hero and the OUN and UPA were organizations that fought for national liberation. Bandera was finally declared a hero, officially accused by the European Parliament of being openly a Nazi collaborator.
The government of Viktor Yanukovych in 2010, representative of the Russian-speaking regions, dismantled these measures: Shukhevich and Bandera lost the title of heroes and the OUN and UPA organizations stripped them of their character as “liberation fighters.” And the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory was no longer allowed to promote the claims of nationalist figures.
Viktor Yanukovych suffered protests from nationalists for these political changes, but he won the 2012 legislative elections and declared all the languages spoken in a province co-official. Yanukovych’s agreement with Russia at the end of 2013 generated mobilizations in Kiev and Western cities that culminated in the Euromaidan at the beginning of 2014, where very heterogeneous groups participated, although nationalists and neo-Nazis were very active and visible, although they had little electoral support. .
The overthrow of Yanukovych can be described as a coup d’état because the legal steps for his removal were not respected. Opposition to the coup in the South and East began a civil war, during which Crimea was annexed by Russia. The weakness of the Ukrainian army and the advance of the pro-Russian militias could only be contained with the spontaneous mobilization of ultranationalist militias, some openly neo-Nazi, such as the Azov, Aidar, Donbas and Dnipro battalions, who claimed responsibility for the actions of the OUN and the UPA. .
President Poroshenko incorporated these militias into the Ukrainian army to contain them, which implied official recognition of the figures they claimed from the past.
In 2019, Zelensky took office with a large majority, which was not necessarily a democratic triumph because the two main parties until then – the Regions and the Communist Party with broad support among pro-Russians – were banned, which would explain the 39 percent of abstentionism. Zelensky promised to legalize Russian and put an end to the armed conflict, although his first measure was to go to the east to establish agreements with the leaders of the nationalist and neo-Nazi battalions.
The legislative elections, shortly after, were even worse: abstentionism exceeded 51 percent. By his actions at the end of 2021, only 23 percent supported Zelensky. And the publication of the Pandora Papers discredited him further: it showed him as the owner of millions of illegal dollars abroad. As his popularity fell, he increased his anti-Russian speech and his rapprochement with ultranationalists.
* Researcher at the Center for Genocide Studies (UNTREF) and teacher of Contemporary History (Political Science – UBA).
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