hi! how are you? i promise I am not being snarky, being odious or looking for an argument when I ask this. I just always wondered about it and there is no one better than an Ukrainian to ask this to. why is stepan bandera hailed as a hero in ukraine if he was a nazi collaborator? is it a nation wide thing or am i mistaken? I ask this in good faith. thank you:)
Hi! Thank you for asking. It's very difficult to give a short answer, so be ready for a long read.
The topic of Stepan Bandera is a very complex and heavily debated.
The short answer is that Stepan Bandera is not universally hailed as a hero across all of Ukraine. He is a highly polarizing figure. To understand why some view him as a hero while others view him as a collaborator, we have to look at the historical context of World War II, the Soviet Union, and the Ukrainian independence movement.
His status as a hero is rooted in his unwavering fight against the Soviet Union for Ukrainian independence, rather than ideological alignment with Nazi Germany.
1) The "Nazi collaborator" label comes from a complex period in the 1930s and early 1940s. Following World War I, Ukraine was left without an independent state. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) viewed Germany purely as a situational, geopolitical ally against their primary existential threats: Poland and the USSR.
The cooperation was entirely pragmatic. In fact, German intelligence (the Gestapo) noted at the time that the Ukrainian nationalist leaders were uncontrollably pursuing their own independent goals.
2)On June 30, 1941, the OUN declared an independent Ukrainian State in Lviv. This came as a total shock to the Nazis, as an independent Ukraine was never part of the Third Reich's plans.
3)The Nazis demanded the declaration be revoked. When the OUN refused, the Nazis arrested Stepan Bandera on July 5, 1941. He spent the vast majority of World War II imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp.
4)Following Bandera's arrest, the Gestapo arrested and executed thousands of his followers. The military training the OUN initially received from the Germans was later used by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) to fight against the German occupiers from 1942 to 1944.
5)Because Bandera was imprisoned by the Nazis and his organization openly fought against German occupation forces, neither Stepan Bandera nor the OUN were recognized as criminals or criminal organizations at the post-war Nuremberg Trials (unlike the SS or the Nazi Party).
6)While the OUN does have a dark and highly controversial history regarding ethnic violence during the war, the modern perception of Bandera has been drastically distorted by decades of intentional demonization.For the USSR, the Ukrainian independence movement was a massive internal threat. To crush it, Soviet state media relentlessly demonized Bandera. They exaggerated, distorted, and fabricated narratives to turn his name into a synonym for absolute evil.
Today, the russian government continues this exact same tactic. russian propaganda uses the mythologized, monstrous version of Bandera to paint the entirety of modern Ukraine as a "Nazi state."
In this sense, honoring him isn't necessarily about endorsing every historical action of his organization, rather, it has become a powerful way to troll the russians and their state, reject their manufactured narratives, and assert a fiercely independent Ukrainian identity.
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