Voxkomm

I’m reading the 🇺🇦court verdict against socialist Bohdan Syrotiuk, who was sentenced to 15 years for high treason. Among the accusations against him is the “dissemination of content used by Russian propaganda,” including material about Nazism in Ukraine. That includes criticism of the glorification of the OUN and UPA, the Waffen-SS Galicia Division, and the use of Nazi and far-right imagery in the military, including Azov and other units. So here is the wonderfully contorted logic: it is apparently not the glorification of Nazi collaborators, or the tolerance of symbols such as the Wolfsangel, SS bolts and the Black Sun, that provides ammunition for Russian propaganda. No — openly criticizing any of this is what becomes treason. Welcome to the intellectual gymnastics of the post-Maidan establishment: the problem is not what is being glorified or displayed; the problem is the person rude enough to point at it. And for that, a young man gets a 15-year treason sentence (!) So, if I ever cross the Ukrainian border, feel free to look for me in an SBU basement. I, too, suffer from the unfortunate tendency to criticize the apologetics of Nazism in Ukraine. An occupational hazard among Jewish Holocaust researchers, apparently.

OUN leader Yevhen Konovalets is to be reburied in Ukraine. Ukraine continues to build its Pantheon of national heroes, with OUN leaders occupying pride of place. After the reburial of Nazi collaborator Andriy Melnyk, it is now the turn of the OUN’s first leader, Yevhen Konovalets. Konovalets stood at the cradle of the OUN ideology: the same integral nationalism that elevated the struggle for an ethnically homogeneous Ukraine into a political goal, gave antisemitism a prominent place, and cast Poles, Russians, Hungarians and Romanians as enemies of the nation. He embraced political terror. His followers carried out dozens of political assassinations, many of whose victims were Ukrainians—including moderates and opponents of radical nationalism. Konovalets also negotiated with the Abwehr and looked to Nazi Germany as a best potential ally. His reburial today is therefore more than a ceremony. It is another statement about the kind of historical pantheon Ukraine is choosing to construct. Under Zelensky, the state is increasingly embracing militant ethnonationalism—a course likely to deepen divisions within Ukrainian society and fuel further tensions with its neighbours, including countries that have spent recent years standing firmly by Ukraine. This is not historical amnesia. It is a political choice—made by Zelensky and his circle.