Kremlin supporters are relaying a version of the story that Ukrainians collaborated massively with the Nazi regime during World War II. One figure in particular embodies this narrative: Stepan Bandera (1909-1959), the best known, but also the most controversial character of Ukrainian nationalism, set up as an absolute foil by the Russian President, Vladimir Putin.
Stepan Bandera was one of the leaders of the Ukrainian Nationalist Organization (OUN), an underground movement born in the interwar period, and the leader of its most radical and violent branch, which fought through all means to liberate Ukraine from the successive yokes of Poland and the Soviet Union.
Thanks to the war currently underway in Ukraine, Moscow’s instrumentalization of Stepan Bandera has found many relays in France: François Asselineau, former sovereignist presidential candidate, quotes regularly his name and presents him as “one of the main Nazi Ukrainians”. Former senator Yves Pozzo Di Borgo, targeted by an investigation for corruption in connection with Russia, accuse Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of ” to validate “ cet « assassin ».
A violent ultranationalist, imprisoned for terrorism
Apart from a short-lived People’s Republic (1918-1920), Ukraine has only been independent since 1991. Throughout its turbulent history, the current territory is fragmented, notably between Poland, Lithuania, the Austrian Empire and then Russian Empire. In the interwar period, nearly 26 million Ukrainians lived under Soviet domination. The rest, about 6 million people, are scattered between Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia.
Stepan Bandera was born in 1909, in Galicia, a territory located in the west of present-day Ukraine, then belonging to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Unlike the populations within the Russian fold, the Ukrainians of Galicia have certain freedoms and can express themselves in Ukrainian. This is how this region became the breeding ground for a Ukrainian national culture gradually evolving towards the affirmation of nationalism. In the east, on the other hand, Russia leads an assimilationist policy, where the local populations hardly have the possibility of expressing themselves in their language or of having a political structure of their own.
After the First World War, Galicia was attached to Poland. This tries to relegate Ukrainian speakers to the rank of second-class citizens. A policy of “polonization” which will encourage many Ukrainian nationalists to organize and enter into resistance, including the father of Stepan Bandera, Andreï, a Greek-Catholic priest who took part in the Ukrainian revolution of 1917. The events “related to the attempt to establish an independent Ukrainian state” have had “a considerable impact on him”underlines the German-Polish historian Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, in a biography of Stepan Bandera published in 2014:
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