For the last number of years, there has been one regular event every time January 1 rolls around. On that day, Ukrainian far-right activists march through the streets of Kyiv to celebrate the birth of Stepan Bandera (1909-1959), a controversial figure of Ukrainian 20th-century nationalism. In 2023, however, the streets of Kyiv remained silent because of the martial law in effect forbidding demonstrations in times of war.
The celebration was marked silently, but it still managed to trigger yet another controversy around the past with Poland. It originated with the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament, tweeting a photo of the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valeri Zaloujny, giving the thumbs-up next to a portrait of Bandera to celebrate what would have been his 114th birthday.
The image was accompanied by a sentence attributed to this controversial figure: "the total and supreme victory of Ukrainian nationalism will take place when the Russian empire ceases to exist" and that, in the context of the ongoing conflict, "Stepan Bandera's directives are well known to the commander-in-chief of the armed forces."
The tweet was reported in Israeli and Polish media and sparked an outcry. Bandera not only led the radicalized branch of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a group accused of having participated in the Holocaust alongside Nazi Germany, which killed hundreds of thousands of Jews in western Ukraine. Its armed wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), created in 1942, was also responsible for the death of thousands of Poles – between 70,000 and 100,000, according to historians' estimates – killed in northwest Ukraine between 1943 and 1944, turning Bandera into a Ukrainian anti-hero.
In Warsaw, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki curtly recalled that his government had "an extremely critical [position] towards any glorification or even remembrance of Bandera." On January 2, following a discussion with his Ukrainian counterpart, Verkhovna Rada's message was removed from the social media platform.
Demonized and mythologized figure
This episode was just the latest in a series of scandals that keep repeating each year as January 1 draws near. An anti-Semite and xenophobe, Bandera, remains, 64 years after his death, a demonized and mythologized figure. He has long had a contentious position within Ukrainian society itself. "For one part of Ukraine, especially the West, he is a hero. For another, especially the Russian-speaking part of the East, he is a bandit and a Nazi collaborator," said Yaroslav Hrytsak, a historian specializing in Ukrainian nationalism.
You have 79.51% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.