Edited by: Fern Sidman
Ukraine’s outspoken ambassador to Germany, a talk show staple who was central to the public debates that led Berlin to step up weapons deliveries to Kyiv, is facing harsh criticism for defending World War II fascist Stepan Bandera who was a Ukrainian collaborator with the Nazis in a July 2022 interview, according to a Reuters report.
Andriy Melnyk is easily the best known ambassador in Berlin, known for robust social media exchanges in which he condemned as appeasers politicians and intellectuals who opposed arming Ukraine for its fight against Russian invaders, the Reuters report stated in July.
In an interview with German journalist Tilo Jung on the summer of 2022 Melynk defended the World War II-era figure, saying that “Bandera was not a mass murderer of Jews and Poles,” arguing that there was no evidence for such accusations, according to a report on the dw.com web site.
Stepan Bandera is an extremely controversial figure in Ukraine, with some hailing him as a hero in his fight for Ukrainian statehood against the former Soviet Union, but with most acknowledging that did collaborate with Nazi Germany and participated in massacres of Jews and Polish citizens, dw.com reported.
“The statement made by the Ukrainian ambassador is a distortion of the historical facts, belittles the Holocaust and is an insult to those who were murdered by Bandera and his people,” the Israeli embassy said in the summer of 2022.
Polish deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Przydacz wrote on a local online platform of Melnyk’s statements on Bandera that “such an opinion and such words are absolutely unacceptable.”
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry quickly moved to distance itself from Melnyk’s comments, according to the dw.com report.
“The opinion that the Ambassador of Ukraine to Germany Andriy Melnyk expressed in an interview with a German journalist is of his own and does not reflect the position of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement late on Thursday night.
It also expressed its gratitude to Poland “for its unprecedented support in the fight against Russian aggression,” and emphasized the need for “unity in the face of shared challenges.”
Nazi sympathy amongst the populace of modern day Ukraine still exists, and news pertaining to it rarely trickles out.
In January of 2018, the JTA reported that Israeli Ambassador Joel Lion condemned the Lviv region’s decision to name 2019 the year of Stepan Bandera in a statement he published at the time. JTA reported that Lion wrote that he was “shocked” by the recent decision.
“I cannot understand how the glorification of those directly involved in horrible anti-Semitic crimes helps fight anti-Semitism and xenophobia,” he wrote at the time.
Lviv already has a large statue of Bandera, who collaborated with Nazi forces that occupied what is now Ukraine and is believed to have commanded troops that killed thousands of Jews, as was reported by the JTA. Kiev and several other cities have streets named for him.
Bandera was assassinated by a KGB agent in Munich in 1959. The JTA noted that Nazi collaborators in Ukraine were once regarded by authorities as illegitimate to serve as national role models because of their war crimes against Jews and Poles, but Bandera and other former collaborators are now widely regarded as patriot heroes.
In 2020, the Jerusalem Post reported that subsequent to a nationalist march in Ukraine in honor of the Nazi collaborator, the ambassadors of Israel and Poland protested the glorification of Holocaust-era war criminals.
In a joint letter sent by Joel Lion and Polish ambassador Bartosz Cichocki, the two accused the city government of the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv of having “waved the Stepan Bandera banner,” a reference to a portrait of the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator that was hung from a municipal building at the end of a January 1st march honoring Bandera’s 111th birthday, the JPost reported. Hundreds of people attended the march.
“Celebrating these individuals is an insult,” the ambassadors wrote.
In March of 2022, CNN reported that the far-right Azov movement has been part of the military and political landscape in Ukraine for nearly a decade.
CNN offered a background of the movement. They wrote: “An effective fighting force that’s very much involved in the current conflict, the battalion has a history of neo-Nazi leanings, which have not been entirely extinguished by its integration into the Ukrainian military.”
The report added that, “In its heyday as an autonomous militia, the Azov Battalion was associated with White supremacists and neo-Nazi ideology and insignia. It was especially active in and around Mariupol in 2014 and 2015. CNN teams in the area at the time reported Azov’s embrace of neo-Nazi emblems and paraphernalia. “
The existence of an identifiably Azov element within the Ukrainian armed forces – and an effective element at that – poses uncomfortable questions for the Ukrainian government and its Western allies, which continue to send arms to the country, CNN added.
