Written between 2nd and 3rd of July 2026
It looks like Ukraine’s “Nazi problem” has been dragging the country through the mud again.
It’s a topic I originally covered for my 2 documentary projects on the Ukraine War, including the majority of a 3 hour long episode about far right and Nazi groups involved in the war and the propaganda surrounding them.
Early on in the Russo-Ukrainian War these groups like the Social Nationalist movement, Svoboda, Right Sector and their many splinter organisations, gained prominence and legitimisation as they formed Volunteer Battalions that went off to fight when Russian forces marched into Crimea and militarised a growing rebel movement in the Donbas region, all while much of the actual Ukrainian military dropped the ball, hopelessly unprepared for combat.
Ukrainian figures embraced denialism to maintain their new hero image and avoid the thorny questions of how it fit in with a more liberal Ukraine aspiring to join the Western world. Journalists and politicians downplayed their backgrounds or their ideology, presenting them as nothing more than simple “nationalists” or treating their worldviews as irrelevant, all that matters is that they are fighting for Ukraine.
This narrative of sanitisation and denialism has also extended to their old inspirations from World War 2, groups like the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, a far-right Fascistic group which collaborated with Nazi Germany in the hopes of building a German backed independent Ukrainian state.
The OUN helped the Nazis invade the Soviet Union early into the war, before struggling with the fact that their German “liberators” weren’t interested in supporting Ukrainian sovereignty thanks to their racist, anti-slavic, colonialist ideology. One wing, the OUN-B of Stepan Bandera, rapidly declared independence after the invasion and was punished with a campaign of arrests and killings. Another, the OUN-M of Andriy Melnyk, was more cautious and continued to encourage collaborationism until they ended up with the same fate when their tensions with the Nazis over their lack of support for Ukraine became too high.
Both wings had their own militia forces that participated in the Holocaust, while the Banderites also carried out mass killings of Poles in an attempt to force them out of land the OUN wanted for a future Ukrainian state, these were known as the Galicia and Volhynia massacres. They each ultimately ended up down the same path, under arrest or forced underground, then in the final stages of the war, their troops were released and brought back into collaborationism as the Nazis recognised Ukraine as an independent nation, long after they lost the power to make that a reality, in a desperate attempt to encourage more people to fight for them as they tried to hold back the inevitable march towards Berlin.
Their attempts to cosy up to the West didn’t amount to much, with the remaining insurgency in the USSR being suppressed and the rest of the OUN forced to live in exile until the Soviet collapse, but in the new Ukraine a massive divide formed over their legacy, between those who wanted to commemorate the Ukrainian role in the Soviet war on Fascism and those who wanted to lionise the OUN as soldiers from a very long line of Ukrainians who struggled to break their country free from Moscow.
Since the Russo-Ukrainian war began, the influence of the institutionalised far-right and the demand for a historical image of a long running consistent struggle against Moscow has removed this divide and made the lionisation of these groups the mainstream narrative of Ukraine. In 2015 the son of an OUN commander, Yury Shukhevych, elected as an MP for the vigilante, far-right affiliated Liashko movement, wrote the laws glorifying the OUN that were embraced by the rest of Ukraine’s ostensibly liberal parliament, showing that even though the far-right are a tiny, unpopular minority, they have can have a disproportionate level of influence.
This has been causing all sorts of image problems for the country as they struggle to reckon with the fact that the Western neighbours they eagerly want to join with haven’t gone through this transformation.
The Black Sun, Runic symbols, and Totenkopf logos spotted on the uniforms of soldiers, awkward questions about why far-right politicians are decorated commanders with increasing power, the celebration of a World War 2 veteran who fought “the Russians” embarrassing Canada, there was scandal after scandal after scandal.
And as Ukrainians and their staunchest advocates tripped over themselves to present these problems as not so serious or irrelevant, angering ordinary spectators as well as several international governments, Putin’s Russia also of course repeatedly jumped at the opportunities to present Ukraine as a Neo Nazi country, painting themselves as being part of their own continuous line, one with the Soviet victors, reinventing their slowpoke imperialist conquest as a glorious liberation struggle.
Zelensky wasn’t always on board with this “new history”, early in his Presidency he aimed to bridge the divide among Ukrainians influenced by his own mixed background as a leader keen on Ukraine’s Pro-European, Pro-Western direction, but also by his Russian speaking lineage and Red Army war vet family, even in later years he still pushed back on it in some ways, reviving the Soviet WW2 practice of making cities “hero cities” and comparing the Russian invasion to the Nazi one. Just as Putin invokes both the Soviet Union and Russian Empire as a time when Russia was strong, Zelensky would oversee a Ukraine that commemorated both of its sides in the war, the OUN and the Soviet soldiers and Partisans, both for standing up against a bigger power, the USSR or the Third Reich.
But now he’s playing along more, he recently arranged for OUN-M leader Andriy Melnyk to be brought back from his former resting place in Luxembourg and reburied in Ukraine, paying tribute to him as a “Ukrainian hero”, and shortly after the latest scandal broke, when he announced an honorary name “Heroes of the UPA” for a special forces unit called Separate Special Operations Center North, causing intense outrage in Poland.
The UPA or Ukrainian Insurgent Army was the paramilitary wing of the OUN-B, and their responsibility for the Galicia and Volhynia massacres looms large in Polish memory, the sanitised Ukrainian history has simply filed off this guilt or presents it as only carried out by a few bad apples, so they want commemorating the OUN and the UPA to be seen as just a harmless expression of nationalism, but this is kind of like Germany naming an army unit the Adolf Hitler Regiment and asking Jews not to be offended because “oh, we’re not doing it because we like the race massacres he was responsible for, we just like him because he made Germany strong again”.
In an interview, Zelensky argued that the unit themselves had asked for the new name and he just ended up accepting them, but he also took ownership for the decision and refused to change course, in the announcement of the name he had argued that it was restoring “historical traditions” to the army, he also arrogantly basically told the Polish not to complain because Ukraine was supposedly “fighting for Europe” and by extension Poland itself, by holding back Russia.
This is a narrative that has never really had any strength to me, over the years it has been repeatedly made to push the idea of us having a common cause with Ukraine, the idea that if Ukraine falls we’ll be next, but although the braindead pundits on Russian TV love to fantasise about bludgeoning the rest of us into submission no one has ever proven that Putin is so risky or borderline suicidal that he’d want to risk World War 3 by attacking a nuclear armed mutual defence alliance*. If anything, we’ve seen the opposite. He’s a greedy, imperialist bastard, but he’s been gunning for the countries that aren’t in NATO because they’re the ones that don’t have the deterrent of being able to ring up their buddies and have St Petersburg turned to glass faster than sand in a Minecraft furnace.
*how they’d even manage to do that when they can’t even conquer a quarter of Ukraine in a war longer than WW2, losing their international influence as it ties them down, I don’t know
Ukraine is not fighting “for Europe”, they’re fighting for themselves, and there’s nothing wrong with that, a burglar broke into their house and they’re trying to get them out, they don’t want to be dictated to by a Russia with a sinister, obnoxious “big brother” complex paved in blood, and they deserve help in doing that, but it doesn’t mean that we have to all zip our mouths out of gratitude when their leaders try to whitewash a toxic historiography.
The name immediately caused massive political damage, Polish politicians across the board condemned Zelensky in a war moment of something close to unity after Poland’s extensive divide between its 2 big factions, the right wing Law and Justice party (PiS) and the liberal coalition led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
The PiS linked Polish President, Karol Nawrocki, stripped Zelensky of the prestigious Order of the White Eagle, an honour given to him for promoting Polish-Ukrainian relations, and even though government figures didn’t agree with that action itself, they agreed with the thinking behind it that Zelensky had done massive damage and insulted Poland with the naming.
The Ukrainians held firm though, other prominent Ukrainian figures handed their honours back in protest, starting a tit-for-tat of medal mailing as Polish figures then got rid of their Ukrainian awards, and Zelensky decided to skip a Polish conference held to organise recovery efforts for Ukraine.
Ukrainian commentators began a big social media war trying to influence the narrative referring to the Polish Home Army (the Armia Krajowa - AK) as a whataboutism tactic, accusing them of their own Nazi collaborationism and war crimes. I’ve never heard of the AK collaborating with the Nazis before, although I guess in fringe scenarios it could have happened, it’s not an area I’ve looked into, but the AK were an insurgency loyal to the remains of the pre-war Polish government, which moved to London in exile after the joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of the country.
The Polish exiles were staunchly loyal to the allies, and as well as the AK insurgency in Poland itself, they also organised the “Polish Army in the West” on the Western front and air force pilots who defended Britain during the Blitz. On top of that, AK groups did commit various mass killings against civilians in retaliation for the actions of the OUN, but historians generally agree that the OUN was responsible for considerably more murder. So though I don’t want to whitewash really any person or group, the Polish fighters of the war are not wading through the same moral low ground as the failed opportunistic bootlickers of the OUN.
Another argument I heard was a stronger one, when Zelensky handed his order back he pointed out that several other historical figures including Catherine the Great of Russia, who presided over the division of Poland as a monarch, annexing part of it while the rest was taken by Germany and Austria, Benito Mussolini, who sided with Hitler as he divided Poland yet again, and Gerhard Schroeder, former German chancellor turned Putin sympathetic lobbyist.
Schroeder may be cosying up to repulsive people, but that doesn’t inherently make him an enemy of Poland as a country. The other 2 though, giving your highest awards to people who cut up your country like a pizza isn’t the best look when you want to stand on principle. I don’t know why Catherine got her award, but an often forgotten quirk of history is that Mussolini wasn’t always aligned to Hitler despite the Nazis being totally inspired by his Fascist movement, in the 1930s he was a supporter of Poland and even threatened to go to war to defend Austria, which Hitler so badly wanted to annex, as he became less connected to the Allies though, he drifted to Hitler loyalism and went along with his schemes.
Officially these other people still have their orders because it’s custom that you don’t take them away after the recipient is dead, but that doesn’t really solve the image problem.
Even though much of Poland was still highly hostile over the scandal, with it contributing to a rise in Polish Anti-Ukrainian sentiment, Donald Tusk tried to simmer the conflict down by presenting Ukraine and Poland as standing together against a common Russian enemy, arguing that the past should be left to historians while we focus on the present, but his deescalation landed him with a slap in the face as a few days later Zelensky gave a speech defiantly boasting that “no one, ever, will dictate how Ukraine should live, how we should speak, whom we should love, whom we should be grateful to, or which heroes we should honor”, announcing a planned law to build a new monument called the Ukrainian National Pantheon.
- The Ukrainian People’s Republic and West Ukrainian People’s Republic, 2 Ukrainian independent states active in late World War 1 and the early interwar period, and their military groups the UPR Army and Ukrainian Galician Army
- The Ukrainian State, a Pro-German collaborationist nation that briefly replaced the UPR in late WW1
- Carpatho-Ukraine, a very short lived western Ukrainian state from 1939, and its army the Carpathian Sich
- And the OUN
In response, Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister replied that “no one will tell us how to vote for a given country to join the European Union”, essentially threatening to veto Ukraine’s plans to try and rapidly join the EU, and all Zelensky could come up with as a reaction was (and I’m paraphrasing here) ”pretty please don’t do that, we can’t stop you but it would be really mean :(“, even Tusk lost his patience, saying that Poland’s one sided good will is over. And that’s Ukraine’s big problem.
It’s a good thing that the Ukrainians are independently minded, I used to get irritated seeing Ukrainian leaders aggressively demanding more and more in lecturing pressure campaigns, but realistically, they’re fighting for their land and have every right to be assertive about it, I’d much rather see that than watch them bend over and say yes sir no sir to the dementia riddled carrot in Washington, or anyone else for that matter.
But while they love stubborn independence they also dived into this whole conflict to join the EU, it was the cause that saw mass rebellion in 2014 to overthrow their government, breaking out into the Crimean occupation, the separatist war and eventually the wider war, and that demands much more compromise. You need to have unanimous consent from its existing members to join, you need to pass a very long list of tests, and once you’re in you have to adopt European laws whether you like them or not, accepting being a piece of a wider whole.
And in the rest of that whole few people have any doubt that the Nazis were the greater evil of World War 2 and that their collaborators should be viewed accordingly. Ukraine’s loose attempts to defend their new historiography abroad are a miserable failure, so who should compromise for who at the end of the day?
Ukraine is a long way off from actually getting to the finish line, either of the war or of their effort to truly reach their ideal international alignment of enthusiastic embrace from the West, and who knows if its neighbours will really derail it all over an identity war, but one thing is for certain, the country’s refusal to reflect on the massive problems with their “new history”, their new national idea, isn’t doing them any favours.
I don’t particularly see Ukraine as an “ally”, go back just over 10 years and they flip flopped between Russia and the West, although they’d picked their side now, they also still have a lot of elements that stick out like a sore thumb.
They’ve made genuine progress in a lot of areas, with anti corruption measures that have actually held a lot of people to account (even though takes a while), social progress with Zelensky batting for LGBT rights, but this is also a country where far-right activists could form their own militias and either act as independent agents or gain prominence and weapons through military integration on their terms, and it’s a country that sometimes likes to bomb its “allies”. I was thinking of the Nord Stream attack, where after years of denialism a Ukrainian has now been prosecuted for the attack, but just before I wrote this another Ukrainian carried an assassination attempt in Monaco, the target? A Ukrainian oligarch who betrayed his country. Call me conspiratorial, but I doubt that was a lone wolf attack.
Now whether I see Ukraine as an ally doesn’t really matter, they deserve independence and have every right to fight for it, like any other country does, you can, for example, be disgusted by the ideology or actions of Hamas but still believe in Palestinian rights after all, the right to sovereignty is rarely something that should ever be conditional,, and I certainly respect them for standing up to a big imperialist power at great cost, but they want to be an ally, and being a real ally demands something more than that.
It’s genuinely so weird living in a timeline of constant own goals, history is being made by fucking idiots.
As Russia gets tied down in Ukraine and loses its ability to influence the rest of the world, the West would be on top if wasn’t for the fact that Donny is an indecisive, idiotic denthead, Ukraine got a major break when the Putin sympathetic Viktor Orban got punted out of office then decided to just make more enemies by intensifying the historical war, Putin could’ve capitalised intensely on the new divide in the Atlantic if he hadn’t gotten so brazen with his warmongering and deluded himself with the fantasy that he’s apparently fighting all of NATO at once, while he’s actually fighting one country and a bunch of warehouses.
The writers room for this season of Earth deserve to be sacked.
Ironically as this whole crisis escalated Zelensky complained about UK councils removing the Ukrainian flag from their flagpoles, in an initiative from the Reform UK party to only use national or regional flags on government buildings, in response to this he warned “small mistakes can break big friendship”.
Nice one man, maybe you should listen to your own advice every so often, here’s another one for you, “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”.