- Neo-Nazi Groups Escalate Violence.
- U.S. Government Officials Back The Coup: Senator John McCain, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, went to Kiev to show solidarity with the protestors.
- McCain in Dec 2013 proudly recording orchestrated protests - later in 2014 sc. ´revolution´ on the Maidan, (video clip below).
- The Maidan Massacre: On February 20th, unidentified snipers began firing into the crowd killing people on all sides.
- The Svoboda party traces it roots to the Ukrainian partisan party in World War II which was allied with Nazi-Germany.
- Neo-Nazis also dominate Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, which was founded by Andriy Biletsky, an avowed white supremacist who claimed that Ukraine’s national purpose was to rid the country of Jews and other inferior races.
- The Minsk II agreement in 2015 ended the worst fighting and set up a buffer zone around the breakaway republics, but a low-intensity civil war continued. An estimated 14,000 people have been killed since 2014.
- The Odessa Fire Massacre.
- Americans realize that neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine have been shelling the Donbas region for the last 8-years in violation of the Minsk agreement killing thousands of innocent civilians?
- Ukrainian Nationalist Volunteers Committing ‘ISIS-Style’ War Crimes | Sep 10, 2014
More:
- Viktor Yanukovych was democratically elected as president of Ukraine in 2010 in an election certified by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE, a fact not mentioned in NewsGuard's writings on the change of government in Ukraine. Even though Yanukovych agreed to an EU political settlement and early elections, violence forced him to flee from the capital on Feb. 21, 2014.
- Nuland: [3:02] - "and you know,.. FUCK THE EU!"
- How the OUN-UPA embraced ethnic violence, collaborated with Nazi Germany, and became one of the most controversial movements of World War II.
- Burned villages. Families slaughtered in their homes. Women, children, and the elderly hacked to death with axes and pitchforks. Thousands of Jews beaten, tortured, and murdered during pogroms that accompanied the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
How Obama And Biden Installed Neo-Nazis In Ukraine
Today’s war cannot be understood without first understanding the U.S. government’s role in Ukraine's Maidan Coup.
If the American people knew the truth about how Obama and Biden helped Neo-Nazi factions overthrow the elected government of Ukraine, they might not be so eager to start World War III. Today’s crisis in Ukraine cannot be understood without first understanding the U.S. government’s role in the Ukrainian Maidan Coup.
In 2013, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych rejected an IMF loan and EU association agreement because he claimed the loan would hand over control of Ukraine’s natural resources and increase the cost of living for the Ukrainian people.
In response, a highly organized western-backed color revolution led by U.S. government officials was immediately deployed against Yanukovych.
U.S. organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an infamous CIA front, trained activist journalists to utilize social media, funded television stations supporting the protest, and bussed many protestors in from out of town.
NED recently deleted its records of funding projects in Ukraine, but the archived web pages can be found here.
Neo-Nazi Groups Escalate Violence
What started as non-violent, peaceful protests in Kiev’s Independence Square, known as Maidan, quickly escalated into violent attacks against police and government officials with rocks, bats, metal bars, bulldozers, and Molotov cocktails.
Western media outlets claimed that these protests were peaceful, grassroots demonstrations. They failed to mention the Neo-Nazi elements who seized weapons, commandeered government buildings, and bloodied Ukraine’s streets in escalating violence.
One example of this escalation is covered in the Oliver Stone documentary, “Ukraine On Fire.” On November 30, 2013, the Ukrainian Chief of Staff, associated closely with the U.S. State Department, ordered the streets to be cleared of protestors for the erection of the annual Christmas tree.
When the police arrived, they were met by a highly aggressive and well-organized faction of Ukraine’s Right Sector, who provoked the police into a violent reaction against peaceful protestors, which is all the western corporate media reported on. Predictably this resulted in more unrest and violence, which was further fueled by U.S. Senator John McCain’s support of the protest.
https://youtu.be/PpA7K4F8MJk?si=OzB95CyJs4AgBVM3
U.S. Government Officials Back The Coup
Senator John McCain, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, went to Kiev to show solidarity with the protestors. McCain met with opposition leaders and appeared on stage in Maidan Square, where he stood shoulder to shoulder with Svoboda leader, Oleh Tyagnibok.
When President Yanukovych was asked about relevant U.S. communications during the time, he replied, “My highest level contact was Vice President Biden. We had frequent phone conversations, but the problem was that Mr. Biden said one thing, but they did different things in Ukraine.”
Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was caught on a leaked phone call planning Ukraine’s new government, where she can be heard saying, “I think Yats [Arseniy Yatsenyuk] is the guy” and discussing how to “glue this thing.” Nuland mentioned Svoboda’s Tyahnybok as one of the leaders they were working with.
The phone conversation revealed the highest-ranking U.S. official who ostensibly represented the Obama administration in Ukraine, and the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, clearly plotting a coup d’état from within the U.S. embassy against a foreign country’s duly elected president.
Less than one month after the audio leaked, Yatsenyuk became the next prime minister of Ukraine.
https://youtu.be/xi3oA4lukec?si=Bj8vcPaSTdALvb1D
The Maidan Massacre
On February 20th, unidentified snipers began firing into the crowd killing people on all sides.
Although the U.S. immediately blamed the Yanukovych administration, another leaked audio call, this time between the E.U.’s foreign affairs chief and the Estonian foreign minister, revealed that they believed pro-U.S. forces had staged a false-flag attack as a pretext to remove Yanukovych and finalize the coup.
The Maidan Massacre was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Armed mobs took over the Ukrainian government leading to the start of the civil war in Donbas and the Russian annexation of Crimea.
The newly formed government accepted a $15 billion IMF loan offer which reportedly increased the price of natural gas by as much as 50 percent for the Ukrainian people.
The Maidan Massacre trial and investigation produced overwhelming evidence that Maidan protesters were massacred by snipers at Maidan-controlled buildings, rather than by government snipers—who were nevertheless charged with the crime.
The evidence, which went unreported by the western media, included videos, testimonies by over 100 wounded protesters, several dozen prosecution witnesses, and forensic ballistic and medical examinations by government experts.
Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Svoboda Party and its founders Oleh Tyahnybok and Andriy Parubiy played leading roles in escalating the violence in Maidan Square and went on to play leading roles in the newly formed government.
https://youtu.be/sa9nCRgZm00?si=yPoWljSsVhMhDUCK
The Svoboda Party
The Svoboda party traces it roots to the Ukrainian partisan party in World War II which was allied with Nazi-Germany. Until 2004, Svoboda was called the Social-National party, a deliberate reference to the Nazi’s National-Socialist party. The leader of Svoboda, Oleh Tyahnybok, has openly targeted Jews and ethnic Russians in Ukraine for many years.
In 2004, he was kicked out of Viktor Yushenko’s government for a speech calling for Ukrainians to fight against a “Muscovite-Jewish mafia.” In 2005, he wrote open letters demanding Ukraine do more to halt the “criminal activities” of “organized Jewry.”
The BBC reported on the danger of Svoboda’s rise in 2012. The European Parliament passed a resolution that same year condemning Svoboda as “racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic.” Yet, somehow the U.S. government thought it was appropriate to back these neo-Nazi groups pushing for the ethnic cleansing of Ukraine.
Every January 1st, tens of thousands of Svoboda followers march through the streets of Ukraine, holding torches to honor the birth of Stepan Bandera, the leader of the Ukrainian partisan forces who sided with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Western historians say that Bandera’s followers carried out massacres of Polish and Jewish civilians.
When Yatsenyuk became Prime Minister, he rewarded Svoboda’s role in the coup with three cabinet positions, including Oleksander Sych as Deputy Prime Minister and governorships of three of Ukraine’s 25 provinces. Svoboda’s Andriy Parubiy was appointed Chairman (or speaker) of Parliament, a post he held for the next 5 years.
The Azov Battalion
Neo-Nazis also dominate Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, which was founded by Andriy Biletsky, an avowed white supremacist who claimed that Ukraine’s national purpose was to rid the country of Jews and other inferior races. It was the Azov battalion that led the post-coup government’s assault on the self-declared republics and retook the city of Mariupol from separatist forces.
The Minsk II agreement in 2015 ended the worst fighting and set up a buffer zone around the breakaway republics, but a low-intensity civil war continued. An estimated 14,000 people have been killed since 2014. Congressman Ro Khanna and progressive members of Congress tried for several years to end U.S. military aid to the Azov Battalion. They finally did so in the FY2018 Defense Appropriation Bill, but Azov reportedly received U.S. arms and training despite the ban.
The Odessa Fire Massacre
On May 2nd, 2014, a gang of Ukrainian neo-Nazis brought into Odesa by an oligarch named Ihor Kolomoysky, attacked a group of Russian-speaking Ukrainians who were peacefully occupying large tents outside the Odesa Trade Union House.
The crowd escaped the violent mob by running into the Trade Union House, which the neo-Nazi mob subsequently lit on fire with Molotov cocktails. Beatings and gunshots massacred innocent civilians, and those trapped inside were burned alive.
Ihor Kolomoysky, the Ukrainian billionaire oligarch, who funded the Azov Batallion and other neo-Nazi militant groups, was not only the key man behind the Odesa Fire Massacre, but he was also the key man behind Burisma Holdings, the corrupt gas company which paid Hunter Biden $83,000 a month.
Kolomoysky bankrolled many private Ukrainian militias like the Dnipro and Aidar Battalions and often deployed them to protect his financial interests in PrivatBank, the largest commercial bank in Ukraine.
The Pandora Papers revealed that the current President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, is also financially entangled with Ihor Kolomoysky via off-shore bank accounts.
Kolomoysky, who owns one of the largest media conglomerates in Ukraine, 1+1 Media Group, also happened to produce the movies and television shows that lifted Zelensky into the national spotlight leading to his presidency.
The nonprofit research group, Marco Polo, which is doing a comprehensive report on Hunter Biden’s Laptop, made the connection between Hunter Biden’s text messages and Kolomoysky’s neo-Nazi massacres in Ukraine.
In the text messages pictured below, Hunter Biden asked Hallie Biden, his brother’s widow-turned-mistress if she believed that he had “children burned alive in DONETSK” or “children killed in Donetsk, Ukraine.” Undoubtedly, in reference to the Kolomoysky-funded neo-Nazi war crimes in Eastern Ukraine.
https://youtu.be/OKjGnc1wGK0?si=WKYTg8UzGiUNs_UT
On February 24, when Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukrainian territory on a stated mission to “demilitarize and denazify” the country, the western propaganda machine went into overdrive to cover up how Obama and Biden installed these neo-Nazi factions in Ukraine.
This wasn’t the first time the corporate media and the U.S. political establishment covered up for what Obama and Biden had done in Ukraine. Back in 2019, the political establishment impeached President Trump for asking questions about what corrupt American policymakers had been doing in Ukraine.
How many Americans realize that the U.S. government aided neo-Nazi militias in overthrowing the democratically elected president of Ukraine in 2014? How many Americans realize that neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine have been shelling the Donbas region for the last 8-years in violation of the Minsk agreement killing thousands of innocent civilians?
How many Americans know that Obama and Biden armed and trained Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion who are guilty of committing 'ISIS-Style' war crimes (Sep 10, 2014 at 12:36 PM EDT)?
This video has been removed for violating YouTube's Terms of Service
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/5qlBPtQg3MU
Every modern American and NATO war has been a total disaster based on false premises, which has turned stable countries into hotbeds of chaos, corruption, and terrorism. US government-backed regime change didn’t work in the Middle East, and it has now directly resulted in this war between Russia and Ukraine.
Support the innocent people of Ukraine and Russia, but do not support the corrupt governments that created this bloodshed. Do not support the globalist banking cartel, the military-industrial complex, and the western propaganda machine.
The same neoconservatives and neoliberals who spent the last few decades killing millions of innocent civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Somalia are now trying to manipulate the American people into supporting a war in Ukraine against nuclear-armed Russia.
A diplomatic solution might be as simple as demilitarization in Ukraine, stopping the shelling in the Donbas region, and signing a treaty promising Ukraine will never join NATO.
Still, the American foreign policy elite and the useful idiots who support them are currently lobbying for escalation, no-fly zones, and World War III.
Pray for peace and diplomacy.
Disclaimer: I did not support the U.S. government’s 2014 coup overthrowing the democratically-elected government of Ukraine, nor did I support Ukraine’s shelling of Donbas for the last 8-years, nor do I support Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine. The neo-Nazi factions represent a small percentage of Ukraine, but a significant percentage that played a major role in the 2014 coup, the War in Donbas, and the ongoing war with Russia. This isn’t a story of good versus evil. It is a story of corrupt governments ruthlessly fighting for competing self-interest, while ordinary citizens suffer the consequences.
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https://www.kanekoa.news/p/how-obama-and-biden-installed-neo
McCain in Dec 2013 proudly
recording orchestrated protests
- later in 2014 sc. ´revolution´ on the Maidan.
__
‘Poles, Russians, and Jews must be exterminated’: The bloody history of Zelensky’s heroes (DISTURBING CONTENT)
Published 3 Jun, 2026 19:02
Burned villages. Families slaughtered in their homes. Women, children, and the elderly hacked to death with axes and pitchforks. Thousands of Jews beaten, tortured, and murdered during pogroms that accompanied the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. These are some of the atrocities associated with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) – movements whose legacy remains one of the most divisive issues in Eastern Europe more than eighty years after World War II.
For decades, supporters of the OUN-UPA have portrayed its members as freedom fighters who resisted both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in pursuit of Ukrainian independence. Opponents, however, point to a different record: collaboration with the Third Reich, participation in anti-Jewish violence, and the mass killing of Polish civilians during the Volhynia massacres of 1943-1944, which Poland today officially recognizes as genocide.
Far from being settled history, this debate has recently returned to the center of international politics. In 2026, a new diplomatic dispute erupted after Ukraine's Vladimir Zelensky honored the UPA tradition at the state level, prompting outrage in Poland and reigniting long-standing accusations that modern Ukraine is rehabilitating organizations linked to fascism, ethnic cleansing, and wartime crimes. At the very moment when Polish and Ukrainian officials are working together to exhume the victims of Volhynia, disagreements over the legacy of Bandera, Shukhevich, and the OUN-UPA continue to poison relations between the two countries.
Below, we’ll talk about the origins of modern Ukrainian nationalism, the motives behind the mass killings of Poles and Jews by underground nationalist forces, and the reasons why OUN-UIA leaders collaborated with Nazi Germany.
The ideology behind Ukrainian ‘heroes’
Ukrainian integral nationalism, which became the foundation of OUN-UIA ideology, owes much to the writings of Dmitry Dontsov. In the mid-1920s, he articulated a doctrine of Ukrainian nationalism that was heavily influenced by the fascist ideology of the time.
In his 1926 work ‘Nationalism’, he proclaimed the principle of Social Darwinism in relations between nations: he stated that various peoples exist in a state of perpetual and merciless conflict, and the strong ones “expand” at the expense of the weak.
He dismissed morality as a constraint, arguing that “the end justifies the means” – i.e., any form of violence could be justified in the name of national success, including the physical extermination of anyone not belonging to one’s “own” nation.
According to this doctrine, the Ukrainian nation was seen as an absolute value, superior to the lives of the individuals who inhabit the country. Dontsov’s ideal was a totalitarian movement where individual interests were entirely subordinate to the greatness of the nation. He envisioned the future Ukrainian state as monoethnic and imperial, encompassing all “ethnographic Ukrainian lands” and purged of outsiders, including Russians (seen as Ukraine’s eternal strategic and mystical enemies), Jews, and Poles.
Such a state would be governed by an order, a special “ruling caste” – an elite composed of the “best people” who would manifest maximum ruthlessness for the sake of the national idea. Dontsov explicitly stated that members of this elite “know neither mercy nor humanity... they are driven solely by a burning desire to maintain the integrity of the nation,” not tolerating anything foreign and dealing with enemies in a decisive manner.
He envisioned a strong national leadership capable of implementing the Ukrainian liberation policy in order to address urgent challenges. From this perspective, Dontsov believed that the leaders of fascist, totalitarian, and anti-communist states – most notably Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler – could serve as role models for Ukrainians.
Dontsov extolled fanaticism and amorality, asserting that the driving forces of nationalism should be will, strength, expansion, and violence, along with racism, fanaticism, mercilessness, and hatred.
It’s no surprise that such an ideology inherently permitted and justified political terror. Dontsov established close ties with the Ukrainian Military Organization and urged his comrades to abandon discussions with opponents and resort to radical actions for the sake of the nation.
“You will attain a Ukrainian state or perish in the struggle for it,”
proclaims the precept from Dontsov’s ‘Decalogue of the Ukrainian Nationalist’. In this manifesto, a “true patriot” is instructed to avenge fallen comrades and harbor hatred for the enemies of his nation.
In essence, Dontsov proclaimed violence a virtue. By the early 1920s, many of his followers, including members of the Ukrainian Military Organization, resorted to individual acts of terror against those they deemed agents of “anti-Ukrainian policies.”
The rise of the OUN
The Ukrainian Military Organization was a clandestine military group founded in 1920 by Colonel Evgeny Konovalets who spent over 10 years in exile and hoped to one day return and seize power in Ukraine.
The organization’s mission was to fight against Polish and Soviet authorities for Ukraine’s independence, employing tactics of terror and inciting a “revolutionary explosion among the Ukrainian people.”
In 1921, Stepan Fedak attempted to assassinate Polish Prime Minister Jozef Pilsudski by shooting the “dictator” of the Polish Republic. The operation failed (Pilsudski emerged unscathed) but it underscored the radicals’ willingness to take extreme measures.
Over the following years, Ukrainian nationalists continued their underground activities, including political assassinations and sabotage. In 1926, in Lviv, 19-year-old Roman Shukhevich, who would later lead the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, shot and killed Polish school supervisor Jan Sobinski. He was accused of persecuting Ukrainian students, and thus the nationalists believed he deserved death. Each year the number of victims of such violence grew by the dozens.
That same year, the organization found its ideological “compass” in Dontsov’s published work titled ‘Nationalism’. This solidified its stance as an ultra-nationalist and fascist organization.
The organization founded by Konovalets was the largest and most radical of its time, but it wasn’t the only one. In 1929, the First Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists took place in Vienna, where various factions – including the Ukrainian Military Organization – came together to form a new entity: the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Led by Konovalets, the movement’s ideology was rooted in the principles set forth by Dontsov, elevating the cult of strength, blood, and national superiority to an absolute value.
During the 1930s, the OUN engaged in underground activities, particularly in Galicia. It was also during this period that Stepan Bandera emerged as a prominent figure among the nationalists. Young, ruthless, and determined, he quickly established himself as one of the recognized leaders of the OUN, gaining notoriety through violent acts against high-ranking Soviet and Polish officials.
In 1933, Bandera organized the high-profile assassination of Soviet diplomat Andrey Mailov, who worked at the Soviet consulate in Lviv. The assassin, Nikolay Lemik, shot the diplomat inside the consulate building.
However, the OUN considered its real “triumph” the assassination of Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Pieracki in June 1934. Pieracki was the mastermind behind a campaign known as “pacification” which aimed to suppress the Ukrainian nationalist movement in Galicia. Bandera personally selected Grigory Matseiko to carry out the assassination. Matseiko fatally wounded Pieracki right on the street in Warsaw.
A Polish court sentenced Stepan Bandera to death for organizing the murder, but the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. During his trial, Bandera showed no remorse, and stated: “We know how to value our lives and those of others, but our idea is worth making millions of sacrifices for.”
Bandera’s imprisonment did not last long – he was released in 1939 after Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and quickly rejoined the nationalist movement.
By the late 1930s, after Konovalets was assassinated by Soviet intelligence agent Pavel Sudoplatov, the OUN splintered into factions of “moderates” and “radicals.” This division became apparent by 1940, as the organization split into the Melnik faction (led by Andrey Melnik) and the Bandera faction (led by Stepan Bandera).
Despite their differences, both factions remained committed to the ideas of integral nationalism and sought allies to combat their common enemies in Ukraine. Soon, they found such an ally in Nazi Germany.
Terror against Jews
Ukrainian nationalists placed their main hope in Adolf Hitler, with whom Konovalets met several times in the 1930s. They believed that with the support of the Nazis, they could finally build an independent state. As Dmitry Dontsov wrote at the time, “For us, the most important aspect of Hitlerism is its commitment to a decisive struggle against Marxism.”
The connections between the nationalists and the Nazis were so significant that in 1939, just a few weeks before WWII broke out, Andrey Melnik personally met with Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of the Abwehr. As a result of these negotiations, the OUN received specific directives from the German command on gathering intelligence about the USSR and conducting subversive activities in Poland.
However, the collaboration with the Nazis did not distract the Ukrainian nationalists from what they considered more pressing tasks: eliminating ethnically foreign elements.
In a May 1941 directive, the OUN explicitly stated that Russians, Poles, and Jews were enemies of the Ukrainian nation and must be annihilated.
In the early days of Nazi Germany’s war with the USSR in June 1941, nationalists called on people to take up arms and “destroy the enemy,” declaring:
“Muscovites, Hungarians, Jews – these are your enemies. Eliminate them!”
And words soon turned to actions.
After German forces captured Lviv on June 30, 1941, Ukrainian nationalists unleashed a brutal pogrom against the city’s Jewish population. OUN militants, operating as part of the so-called Ukrainian People’s Militia and the Nachtigall Battalion, organized raids on Jewish residents. People were publicly beaten, tortured, and many were murdered right in the streets or executed after being tortured. Over the course of a few days, thousands of Jews were brutally killed. Similar atrocities occurred throughout the region; the occupying authorities encouraged anti-Semitic violence, which local nationalists eagerly participated in.
The OUN viewed Jews as “supporters of the Moscow-Bolshevik regime” and welcomed their extermination. Many members of the OUN later served in auxiliary police forces for the Nazis, actively participating in the Holocaust by herding Jewish people into ghettos and camps, escorting death marches to Babi Yar in Kiev, and personally executing prisoners.
Although later the UIA declared a fight against Germany, by early 1943 almost all Jews in Volynia and Galicia had been killed, with the active help of Ukrainian nationalists. Few managed to escape, and only a handful of people survived the war within the ranks of the UIA – these were mostly doctors or specialists who were tolerated for practical reasons.
Hunting for Poles
However, the primary targets of the ethnic cleansing efforts of the OUN-UIA were the Poles of Galicia and Volynia, whom the nationalists regarded as historical enemies and “occupiers” of Ukrainian lands that needed to be expelled or eliminated. Plans for these atrocities were devised long before the Volynian massacre: as early as 1938, the OUN’s internal doctrine outlined a project for an uprising aimed at “sweeping away every last Polish element” from Western Ukrainian territory.
This document cynically stated that
“Polish colonists are the hostile force against which the struggle must be ruthless, brutal, and zoological... Those Poles who resist will be destroyed in this fight, while the others must be forced to flee beyond the Vistula [river].”
The OUN demanded that no Poles remain on Ukrainian territory, seeking complete “national purity.” Moreover, the doctrine explicitly stated that “no methods should be considered too harsh... Poles, Russians, and Jews must be exterminated.”
These sinister plans began to be implemented in the spring of 1943 when the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (the military wing of the OUN) carried out the massive slaughter of the Polish population in Volynia.
The Volynian massacre of 1943 became one of the bloodiest crimes of WWII in Eastern Europe. UIA units and armed nationalist peasants attacked hundreds of Polish villages with the intent of physically annihilating all Poles living on “Ukrainian” land. Terror reached its peak in July 1943 during ‘Bloody Sunday’ on July 11, when dozens of settlements were simultaneously attacked by militants.
The methods of execution were unbelievably cruel. People were killed indiscriminately: women, the elderly, children, and infants; many were not just shot but hacked with axes, stabbed with pitchforks, or bludgeoned to death. The homes of Poles were burned to the ground, their property looted; entire villages vanished in flames and were reduced to charred ruins.
Historians estimate that 60,000-100,000 Poles were barbarically killed by the OUN-UIA in Volynia and the surrounding areas. Polish partisan groups later responded with retaliatory terror against Ukrainian villages; however, the initiative for the large-scale extermination of civilians belonged squarely to the Ukrainian nationalists.
The modern Polish Sejm and historians classify the Volynian massacre as an act of genocide. Numerous accounts indicate that the slaughter was premeditated by the leadership of the OUN, which sought to realize Dontsov’s vision of a “monoethnic” state at any cost.
As a result of the actions of the OUN and UIA, Poles in Volynia and Eastern Galicia were virtually annihilated. Waves of refugees fled their homes to escape the violence. The ethnic landscape of the region was radically reshaped through mass terror tactics. Repression was not limited to Poles and Jews: UIA militants also targeted Ukrainians who refused to support them or were suspected of “disloyalty,” labeling them as traitors.
A mass grave containing victims of the UPA, discovered in the Village of Ostrovetskaya. © Wikipedia
Nazi collaborators
The activities of Ukrainian nationalists extended beyond the extermination of Jews and Poles. Under the command of Roman Shukhevich, the head of the OUN military branch, two diversionary Abwehr battalions were formed – the Nachtigall Battalion and the Roland Battalion. These Ukrainian units became part of the Wehrmacht and, in June 1941, crossed the Soviet border dressed in German uniforms and under German command, invading the territory of the Ukrainian SSR alongside the Nazis.
Subsequently, the Germans formed the Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201 from the Nachtigall and Roland battalions. It was dispatched to Belarus to combat partisans. This battalion was also commanded by Roman Shukhevich, who would later become the supreme commander of the UIA.
In 1942, the soldiers under his command participated in punitive expeditions aimed at “pacifying” Belarusian villages suspected of aiding partisans (in other words, burning down entire settlements along with their inhabitants).
Throughout this period, the OUN hoped to reap political benefits from its alliance with the Nazis.
On June 30, 1941, immediately after capturing Lviv, Bandera’s followers, led by Yaroslav Stetsko, proclaimed the establishment of the Ukrainian State and formed a pro-German “government.” In its declaration of statehood, the OUN openly expressed the intention to collaborate with Nazi Germany, which “under the leadership of its Führer Adolf Hitler is creating a new order in Europe and assisting the Ukrainian people in liberating themselves from Moscow’s occupation.”
Roman Shukhevych and Yaroslav Stetsko © Wikipedia
However, these expectations were soon dashed. Adolf Hitler had no intention of granting independence to Ukrainians or creating the proposed ethnocratic Ukrainian state stretching from the Carpathians to the Volga. By July 1941, the German authorities had arrested Stepan Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko, and several other OUN leaders for overstepping their authority.
Despite this, at the grassroots level, the OUN continued to serve the Third Reich. Hundreds of Ukrainian nationalists worked for the Nazi authorities, police forces, and auxiliary SS units. The Ukrainian police, which included OUN members, participated in guarding ghettos and conducting mass executions of Jews, as well as carrying out punitive operations against partisans and the civilian population.
In fact, until the end of 1942, the OUN acted as an ally of the Nazis in their fight against the USSR and “racially alien” peoples. Only when the tide of war turned against Germany did the Ukrainian nationalists try to position themselves as a “third force” fighting both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks.
Even after this shift, however, the UIA continued to unofficially collaborate with the German command – documents show instances of local ceasefires and agreements between the insurgents and the Wehrmacht during 1943-1944. Apparently, the common enemy – Soviet power – brought them closer together than any ideological differences.
***
None of this helped save the Bandera and Melnik movements, however. After defeating Nazi Germany, the USSR turned its attention to the Ukrainian nationalists, effectively blockading western Ukrainian regions. State security agents cleared area after area. By 1950, most of the rebel leaders had been either killed or captured (Roman Shukhevich was killed in 1950, and Vasily Kuk, the last leader of the Ukrainian nationalist underground, was arrested in 1954). All centers of resistance had been suppressed by 1956.
The few OUN figures who survived ended up in exile in the West. Stepan Bandera settled in Munich under the protection of Western intelligence services after the war; however, he was assassinated in 1959 by Soviet agent Bogdan Stashinsky using cyanide gas. Other prominent OUN members – Yaroslav Stetsko, Nikolai Lebed, and Stepan Lenkavsky – settled in Europe and North America, continuing their ideological work by publishing journals and books and lobbying for the “Ukrainian cause” during the Cold War between the USSR and the USA. Within the émigré community, the OUN and UIA gradually became symbols of anti-Soviet resistance, while their dark past was hushed up.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260605120418/https://www.rt.com/russia/640925-bloody-history-of-zelenskys-heroes/
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