It’s important to talk about World War II, because amid the current Russo-Ukraine war, the history and memory of this conflict and the Holocaust is used and abused by both sides. What did Vladimir Putin say in his speech when he decided to invade Ukraine? He mentioned “denazification” as a goal of his “special military operation.” Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov made a statement about the Jewish background of Volodymyr Zelensky and said that Zelensky is a “Kapo” — meaning a Jewish prisoner forced to collaborate with the Nazis. The main idea behind such claims is that Zelensky betrayed his Jewish origin and allied with so-called “Nazi forces “in Ukraine.

In contrast, the Ukrainian leadership is trying to invoke the memory and the history of World War II and the Holocaust to mobilize people in Ukraine to support the government and participate in resistance to Russian aggression. For example, after the liberation of Bucha and Irpin, and after discovering the mass atrocity committed by Russians, some people started to speculate that Bucha is Ukraine’s Babi Yar. These analogies and parallels are also a manifestation of an abuse of history. You can’t relate these events to Babi Yar, because this was the tragedy when during two days almost 34,000 Jewish people — mostly women, elderly people, and children — were killed.

In March 2022, Zelensky addressed the Israeli Knesset and said that Ukrainians made their choice during the Holocaust — and that it was about saving Jews. He erased the important part of Ukrainian history when Ukrainians collaborated with Nazis in killing the Jews. Why did he do that? He wanted to attract the Knesset’s sympathy, because he believed that Israeli support to the Ukrainian cause is not enough.

One of the main motivations for political collaboration was the idea that Adolf Hitler could reinstate Ukraine as an independent state. That’s why the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists [OUN] that was established in 1929 heavily relied on this idea. Ukrainian nationalists had communication and relations with the Wehrmacht and the Nazi Party. They received training and informational support. They believed that if they showed loyalty to Nazi Germany, the independent Ukraine state would be established.

One of the battalions that was formed early on, Nachtigall, entered Nazi-occupied Lviv on June 30, 1941. Local people greeted them and expressed their satisfaction. Right after entering Lviv, the Ukrainian independent state was proclaimed. But the Germans didn’t want to establish such a state. That’s why many leaders, including Bandera, were imprisoned. They spent most of the war in different concentration camps. Still, many Ukrainian nationalists continued collaborating with Nazis. Why? Because they wanted to have access to power, weapons, and military training. That’s why they were members of local administrations, auxiliary police, and the German military itself.

They participated in the Holocaust by guarding the Jews, convoying them to the killing sites, by directly participating in killings, and by hunting out the people in hiding and handing them to Germans.

Antisemitism also played an important role in political collaboration. The concept of Judeo-Bolshevism was popular among Ukrainian nationalists. They associated Jews with Soviet power and blamed Jews collectively for Soviet crimes in Ukraine, including the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932 to 1933. The German occupation forces that shared the same sentiment were portrayed as an ally who could help the Ukrainian people to get rid of Jews and their alleged power.

Another motivation for collaboration with Nazis and their allies was a pragmatic opportunism, typical also in other European countries during the war. Many wanted to survive, to improve their economic condition, to gain power, to make a career, to protect their family members from forced labor and repression. Even many concentration camp guards were former Communist Party members, or Red Army soldiers and officers, because prisoners of war died en masse in Nazi captivity. Millions died from hunger, disease, and poor medical treatment. Many would rather collaborate than to die.

From early in life, Bandera was obsessed with establishing a Ukrainian state. He was born in western Ukraine, which during the interwar period belonged to the second Polish republic. So, formally, he was a Polish citizen who hated all occupiers — Poles, Russians, Hungarians — and other “hostile “groups, including Jews. He dreamt of an independent Ukrainian ethnic state with a fascist political regime.

He became a member and then a leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists to make this dream come true. He believed that Nazi Germany would support Ukrainian aspirations, but instead, it put him behind bars, where he spent almost the entire German-Soviet War. So, he didn’t participate in the war crimes of OUN and its military wing (Ukrainian Insurgent Army, UPA), but he never explicitly condemned them.

In addition, he bears responsibility for these crimes as a leader of OUN. Some members of OUN and UPA criticized his radicalism, fanaticism, and obsession with power. He started to lose popularity after World War II but regained it after his assassination by a Soviet agent in 1959. His violent death made him a martyr and key figure in the Ukrainian heroic pantheon. Soviet propaganda greatly contributed to this Bandera myth, even more than his own political activities.

In the Soviet Union, Bandera was demonized. His name became a byword (banderivtsi, Banderites) for those who were deemed Ukrainian nationalists and dissidents despite their actual attitude toward Bandera and his legacy. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Bandera became extremely popular in Western Ukraine, where OUN and UPA mainly operated. Numerous memorial sites commemorated him. But most people in eastern and southern Ukraine had skeptical and negative views of him.

This changed a little after the so-called Maidan Revolution in 2014 when the newly established Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINM) started to whitewash him and the entire Ukrainian nationalist underground movement. These efforts became stronger after the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022. Numerous streets in Poltava, Odesa, and Kharkiv oblast were named after him. UINM’s official video depicted Bandera in a Christian iconographic style. Both state and non-state memory actors in Ukraine portray him as a symbol of current Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression.

Ukrainian nationalists were divided during World War II. One faction of Ukrainian nationalists obeyed Bandera, while another obeyed Andriy Melnyk. This latter was even more loyal to Nazi Germany than Bandera’s supporters: for example, these people were in favor of the creation of the Waffen SS Division Galicia, officially established in April 1943. Bandera was against this. Why? Because he believed that Ukrainian youth should join the UPA.

Tens of thousands of young Ukrainian men did join Waffen SS Division Galicia. Bandera couldn’t stop this process, so he decided to infiltrate the SS Division. When the Galicia Division was defeated in the Battle of Brody with the Red Army in July 1944, some of its members deserted to UPA. They became part of the Ukraine liberation movement under Bandera and Roman Shukhevych.

Roman Shukhevych, like Bandera, was an active member of OUN in the interwar period. When the Third Reich attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, he entered Lviv as a commander of the Nazi-formed Nachtigall Battalion under the command of the German Abwehr. In 1942, this battalion took part in punitive operations against partisans in Belarus, in which numerous Jews and other civilians were killed. Later on, he became a commander of the UPA, which carried out the ethnic cleansing of Poles and hunted Jews in forests. Thousands of Nazi collaborators from the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police joined UPA and served under his command. Those people were already socialized in anti-Jewish violence, so they brought their experience to UPA.

Yes, there was a socialist faction in OUN led by Ivan Mitrynha, but even he was a proponent of a Ukrainian ethno-state: in his vision of the country’s future, only ethnic Ukrainians could enjoy full citizenship. He demonstrated a special hostility toward Jews, blaming them for “cosmopolitism” and supporting Moscow’s imperialism. In 1941, Mitrynha split up with OUN under Bandera and established his own party — the Ukrainian People’s Democratic Party. “Democratization” of the entire Ukrainian nationalistic movement was a necessity after the military failures of Nazi Germany when its defeat seemed inevitable. OUN understood it was better to seek an alliance with the Western powers, so their political program became less hostile to ethnic minorities.

During the Soviet period the myth of the “Great Patriotic War” was created. Part of this myth was a complete denial of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which divided Poland, the Baltic states, and Finland between Nazi Germany and the USSR. Another key pillar was the creation of the concept of “peaceful Soviet citizens” as collective victims of Nazi Germany, which overshadowed the Holocaust as the specific victimization of Jews. The Ukrainian nationalist movement was demonized and dehumanized. Members of the OUN and UPA were portrayed as cold-blooded murderers, rapists, and Nazi collaborators.

Why did they do this? Because OUN and UPA was the biggest anti-Soviet resistance after World War II, that took a lot of resources to deal with. Tens of thousands of its members were killed or jailed in the Gulag, with even family members sent to Siberia. Through the demonization of OUN and UPA, the Soviet regime wanted to protect its power and prevent new armed resistance.

Part of this demonization was the creation of different historical myths. One is about Nachtigall’s alleged participation in the Lviv pogrom in July 1941. We can’t exclude the possibility of some members being involved — but not the battalion as such. Still, it is also known that Nachtigall was involved in anti-Jewish violence in the Vinnytsia region in 1941 on its own initiative, not because of German orders.

The result of this distortion of Ukraine’s history was that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a great pushback. Many memory actors started to “rehabilitate” the wartime history of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. But the distortion went to the opposite extreme and new myths started to circulate. The ethnic cleansing of Poles, for example, started to be justified, and so, too, the collaboration with the Nazis. Participation in anti-Jewish violence was portrayed as obeying German orders, when Ukrainians had no agency.

But we know that Ukrainian nationalists participated in pogroms against Jews even before the Nazis’ arrival, when the Red Army retreated, and the vacuum of legal power created new opportunities for extremists and opportunists. In many localities, Ukrainians, including members of OUN, attacked Jewish homes, robbed them, raped women and girls, publicly humiliated Jews, and killed many, sometimes in the form of ethnic cleansing.

The alternative history of the Ukrainian nationalist movement existed in the West during the Soviet times and was developed by members of the OUN and UPA who ended up there. It was weaponized by the Western political powers as a part of the Cold War. That’s why the Ukrainian diaspora was the main actor in memory politics. It whitewashed the history of the Ukrainian nationalist movement and wanted to construct a very different narrative that opposed the official Soviet one. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this narrative was exported to Ukraine and favored by some far-right political parties like Svoboda.

In 2010, President Viktor Yushchenko awarded Bandera the title of Hero of Ukraine, which sparked heated debates inside Ukraine and abroad. Many people whose grandpas and grandmas fought the Nazis in the ranks of the Red Army felt deeply offended by this decision. They were not comfortable with celebration of Nazi collaborators, when they had their own, true heroes who sacrificed their lives.

These two main memory regimes — the Soviet and the Ukrainian-nationalist — coexisted in Ukraine for a long time. Their influence and dynamic depended heavily on which political forces were in power. Thus, during the presidency of pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych, the OUN and UPA were not glorified on the national level, but its cult remained in the local level, in Western Ukraine.

It was the turning point. Many ultranationalists occupied key positions of power and started to build memory politics heroizing the OUN and UPA. The key actor became the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory established in 2014 under the supervision of nationalist historian Volodymyr Vyatrovich. He became a proponent of the “decomunization law,” which honored the OUN and UPA as “fighters for the Independence of Ukraine in the 20th century.” Many experts were skeptical and disappointed by this controversial law because it undermined critical studies about the history and legacy of these groups.

Yes, I’m convinced that the Maidan Revolution enabled ultranationalists to hijack memory politics in Ukraine. They started to impose an ultranationalist narrative. And from the beginning many people were actually not in favor of this. Many people opposed this narrative. They did not want Bandera and Shukhevych monuments and streets in their cities. Some were against the so-called “Leninopad” that started with the damaging of the [Vladimir] Lenin monument in Kyiv on December 1, 2013.

After the Maidan Revolution, more than a thousand monuments of Lenin were demolished and taken down across Ukraine, and likewise other monuments to Communist leaders, Red Army soldiers, and Soviet partisans. Tens of thousands of streets were renamed, as well as towns and villages. It happened without proper discussion with local people and historians. Many of those policies were just imposed by force and locals just had to accept the changes. Those who opposed this were labeled as loyal to Russians or as “traitors to the Ukrainian people.”

Those huge divisions over the Soviet legacy became even deeper after the start of so called “decolonization” in 2023. It basically means that all the Russian heritage that is present in Ukraine is meant to be removed. [Alexander] Pushkin, [Mikhail] Bulgakov, [Anna] Akhmatova, [Isaac] Babel — all these monuments are to be removed. It is absurd, because many important events and cities in Ukraine were established and flourished under the Russian Empire. Many ethnic Ukrainians took part in the building of this empire. They were active agents of its political, economic, and cultural processes, not just objects of imperial powers. By destroying this memory, Ukraine canceled an important part of its own history, making it less diverse and inclusive and more ethno-nationalistic and mythical.

One of the by-products of this “decolonization” is bullying of the people who use the Russian language. Even Olena Zelenska, the First Lady, claimed that you shouldn’t speak Russian because it is the “enemy language.” When you call a language used by at least half of the Ukrainian population an “enemy language,” you will create huge tensions within Ukrainian society. To my knowledge, in Lviv one school has already established “language patrols.” The idea is that Ukrainian-speaking students will police Russian-speaking students. The problem is that Russian-speaking students are mostly internally displaced persons from war-torn eastern and southern parts of Ukraine. So, those who suffered the most in this war are surveilled and bullied by less affected children.

Another initiative on the state level is a legislative ban on using the Russian language during school breaks in all schools in Ukraine. This law has not been adopted yet, but it has sparked heated discussions in society. Can you imagine if Ukrainian refugees in the Czech Republic were forced to use only the Czech language during school breaks — and punished, with their parents fined, if they did use the Ukrainian language? Those children are traumatized. They fled their homes and left their lives behind.

This “decolonization” hysteria has caused a growing number of violent incidents in public spaces when people in cafés, buses, and trams were humiliated and beaten for speaking Russian among themselves. These incidents are more common in mostly Ukrainian-speaking western regions, where local authorities, politicians, journalists, and activists discussed publicly what to do with “non-patriotic” compatriots who don’t give up the Russian language in their private lives. The mayor of Ivano-Frankivsk even established a “language patrol” in the city.

The Russian full-scale invasion radicalized Ukrainian society dramatically. Many started to be interested in the roots of Russian imperialism and resistance to it. That’s why the history of OUN and UPA became the core of nationalist memory as an example of an uncompromising fight and self-sacrifice for Ukrainian independence.

This memory is full of myths and silence about inconvenient matters that don’t fit a heroic narrative. In addition, this whitewashes the collaboration with Nazis as the “lesser evil.” That’s why it celebrates not only members of the Ukrainian national underground, but members of military units that Nazis created, gave oaths to Hitler, and fought for the interests of Nazi Germany. By that I mean the Waffen SS Division Galicia, involved in anti-partisan punitive actions in Slovakia and Slovenia in 1944.

For a long time, glorifying Waffen SS Division Galicia was a local phenomenon because its members were born in Galicia. That changed after 2022. Many units in the Ukrainian Armed Forces based on far-right groups — the Right Sector, Karpatska Sich, Azov, and Svoboda — started openly celebrating it as a unit that “fought Bolshevism for Ukrainian independence” and wore patches with its logo — a Ruthenian lion.

The 3rd Assault Brigade, which is a part of the Azov movement, even made an exhibition in the Museum of Kyiv where two photos of Division members were displayed. This exhibition was opened a couple of days after the notorious appearance of Yaroslav Hunka — a ninety-eight-year-old veteran of Waffen SS Division Galicia — in the Canadian Parliament, where he was given a standing ovation in the presence of Zelensky. This caused a huge scandal and political crisis in Canada.

In Ukraine, however, some politicians, intellectuals, and military personnel started to defend Hunka as a “Ukrainian hero.” The Ukrainian Institute of National Memory kept silent and never challenged this problematic discourse. The Center for Countering Disinformation, a working body of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, started to whitewash Waffen SS Division Galicia and claimed that all information about its alleged crimes is “Russian propaganda.”

When I criticized all those troubling developments regarding the celebration of Nazi collaborators, I was harassed, bullied, denounced, and received death threats. Such criticism is a privilege in wartime, which belongs primarily to intellectuals outside of Ukraine. Most Ukrainians can’t afford this due to the self-censorship and fear of being blamed for fueling “Russian propaganda,” meaning “collaboration with the enemy,” which might involve the justice system and imprisonment. Freedom of speech has become a luxury in war-torn Ukraine, in which ethno-nationalist historical myths have become the core of war propaganda.