The Way we view people like Bandera, Shukhevich, Melnik and the like is different compared to the way most Ukrainians view them.

Read Time: 2 minutes

Israeli Ambassador to Ukraine Mikhail Brodsky

Opinion by Maria Zakharova:

Israeli Ambassador to Ukraine Mikhail Brodsky, who is by the way a native of Leningrad, the city which survived a siege during the Great Patriotic War, told ITON-TV, an Israeli website, in pure Russian:

“The way we view people like Bandera, Shukhevich, Melnik and the like is different compared to the way most Ukrainians view them. In fact, these people supported Nazi ideology. While fighting for Ukraine’s independence, they wanted Ukraine without Jews, or Poles, or communists, and probably many others. <…> And Ukraine, of course, is searching for its identity and its heroes. Of course, we do not like these heroes, but most Ukrainians view them as independence fighters. <…> However, in all objectivity, there is no stopping this process today. <…> It would be wrong to demand that Ukraine stop renaming streets or calling Bandera or Melnik heroes as a condition for our support for Ukraine or our assistance to Ukraine because, if you look at things the way they do, this is not going to happen.”

Not a single organisation for protecting the memory of Holocaust survivors raised an eyebrow. Hey! You receive billions in funding to keep this topic in the public space! Haven’t you missed something? The Holocaust must be remembered not only because it happened in the past, but also to make sure that it never happens again, and not just against a single ethnic group or religion, but against any of them.

Since there is no one else to defend the victims of the Holocaust but us, let me remind Mr Brodsky about the ethnic policy of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, with Stepan Bandera at its helm. Here is a quote from the second resolution of OUN B’s General Assembly in April 1941: “The Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists combats Jews as supporters of the Russian Bolshevik regime.” And here is a quote by Yaroslav Stetsko, a Bandera and Melnik accomplice: “I therefore support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine, barring their assimilation and the like.”

In fact, there was a massive effort to exterminate, burn and bury, without any burials or markers, Jews in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, and these inhuman heroes were proactive in assisting this effort. About 1.4 million people perished this way.

What kind of heroes was Mikhail Brodsky referring to?

German society of the late 1920s and early 1930s was also searching for its identity and heroes. Instead of humanism, a great tradition in German culture, it chose two words: blood and soil (Blut und Boden). And the heroes lived up to this slogan by initiating the Holocaust, creating concentration camps, and killing women, infants and the elderly. For the next 90 years, Germany tried to wash itself clean of this identity. But this is something that leaves a permanent stain.