In 2020 Ukraine will celebrate at the state level the birthday of Nazi collaborators from OUN-UPA. The Verkhovna Rada has adopted a decree. The Cabinet of Ministers was recommended: to create an organising committee for the celebration; to provide funding; for the Ministry of Education and Science to hold thematic conferences and round tables; for the Ministry of Culture to organise exhibitions; for the State Committee on Television and Radio Broadcasting to hold television and radio broadcasts and to contribute to the coverage of the anniversary in the Ukrainian media. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine will promote commemorative dates at the level of UNESCO and other international organisations.
On February 6th 2020 Ukraine will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Nazi collaborator Vasily Levkovich at the state’s expense. A Polish citizen, Levkovich was a OUN militant from the age of 18. From September 1941 to March 1943 he served in the Schutzmannschaft, a Nazi-controlled auxiliary police force that dealt with the extermination of Jews, the anti-fascist underground, and the civilian population of Ukraine who the Nazis suspected of assisting the partisans. Levkovich is the organiser and participant of the mass killing of Jews in the Rovno region. In March 1943 Levkovich held a commanding position in UPA, and participated in terrorist actions against partisans and Red Army units. In 1947 Levkovich was sentenced to 25 years of camps, serving time in Vorkuta, where he met his wife, who had been convicted of being a member of UPA. After his release, the Levkovich couple settled in Ukraine and remained in the nationalist underground until the collapse of the USSR.
February 20th will mark the 115th birthday of Ulas Samchuk, editor-in-chief of the Ukrainian-language newspaper “Volyn” under the Nazis. On its pages “Volyn” glorified Adolf Hitler – “the liberator of Ukraine from Moskal-Yid slavery” – and called for Jewish pogroms. Samchuk is a participant in the Nazi mass murder of Jews in the Rovno region.
February 24th will mark 110 years since the birth of Vasil Sidor, colonel of UPA and from 1941 to 1942 the commissioner of the “Nachtigall” Nazi punitive battalion. On June 30th 1941 “Nachtigall” entered Lvov after the Germans, and members of “Nachtigall” carried out the mass extermination of Jews, Poles, workers of Soviet institutions, and other civilians in Lvov. From 1943 until his liquidation by the Ministry of State Security in 1949, Sidor led the UPA headquarters in the Volyn region, and also planned and carried out terrorist actions against members of the Red Army and the civilian population.
Ukraine will also celebrate in 2020 the 100th birthday of the wife of Sidor, Nadezhda Romaniv – a nationalist who was connected to UPA and eliminated by chekists together with her husband.
On May 14th 2020 it will be the 100th birthday of Nazi accomplice Yaroslava Stetsko, wife of OUN leader Yaroslav Stetsko, who declared himself Prime Minister of Ukraine in Nazi-occupied Lvov in June 1941. The real name of Yaroslava Stetsko is Anna Muzyka. In 1944 she and her husband, along with the retreating Nazis, escaped to Germany. In Munich after the war, the Stetsko couple joined the leadership of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations and the World Anti-Communist League. After the death of her husband, Stetsko-Muzyka led the OUN in exile. In 1991 she returned to Ukraine. She headed the neo-Nazi Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists. She was twice elected a deputy of the Verkhovna Rada.
On May 16th the citizens of Ukraine will be congratulated on the 130th birthday of the Nazi criminal Kirilo Osmak. In the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic Osmak worked as a collective farm agronomist, and in June 1941 he went to serve the Nazis. In October 1941 Osmak took up the post of “Minister of Agriculture” in the Nazi-controlled “Ukrainian National Rada”, and in this position he procured products from Ukrainian farmers in favour of the Nazis and OUN militants. From July to September 1944 Osmak was the president of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council created by the leadership of UPA and was a close associate of the leader of UPA Roman Shukhevych. Osmak died in 1960 when he was serving a sentence at Vladimir Central. In 2018 in Ukraine he was posthumously awarded the Order of Freedom. Osmak was also a close associate of the war criminal Andrey Melnik – the leader of OUN, the creator of the Nazi-serving Ukrainian auxiliary police, and the organiser of the destruction of Ukrainian Jewry. On the hands of Melnik and his bandits is the blood of Babi Yar‘s victims. According to the decision of the Verkhovna Rada, on December 12th 2020 the 130th birthday of Melnik will be solemnly celebrated all over Ukraine.
On August 12th Ukrainians will “rejoice” in the 130th birthday of Aleksandr Vishnevsky, an associate of the executioner of Ukrainian Jewry Symon Petliura, an ideologist of OUN and one of the authors of the idea of creating the SS “Galicia” division. On September 23rd Ukrainian will “rejoice” in the 120th anniversary of the geographer from Poland Vladimir Kubiyovich, a Ukrainian nationalist and chairman of the Ukrainian Central Committee (UCC), who operated in Poland under Gauleiter Hans Frank. Kubiyovich is the initiator of the creation of the SS “Galicia” Division. After the war Kubiyovich settled in France, where he engaged in perpetuating the “glorious fighting path” of the SS from “Galicia” and wrote praising journalistic and scientific articles about “Galicia”.
October 17th will mark the solemn 110-year birthday of the terrorist from Poland Yaroslav Starukh, who until 1939 was the leader of the OUN branch on the current border of Poland and Western Ukraine. After the Nazi occupation of Poland, Starukh worked as secretary of the UCC. In the puppet government of Yaroslav Stetsko, Starukh worked in the “Ministry of Information and Propaganda” and was also a key functionary of OUN. He participated in Jewish pogroms. After the war, he carried out terrorist actions in Western Ukraine and Poland. He shot himself in 1947, when he was captured by Polish state security, which cleansed Poland of Banderists together with colleagues from the USSR.
November 12th will mark the 100th birthday of the UPA Colonel Vasily Galasa, leader of the youth movement OUN in Poland, and during the Second World War the leader of the OUN branch in the Ternopol region. After the war, Galasa and his wife Marychkoy Savchyn led the OUN-UPA underground in Ukraine and West Belarus. Galasa was granted amnesty during the “Khrushchev thaw”, and until 1991 he worked as a locksmith at a medical equipment plant and as a planner/economist. After 1991 Galasa was involved in the heroisation and memorialisation of OUN-UPA as an employee of the Institute of Historiography of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
The ideological predecessors of OUN-UPA were not ignored. In 2020 the 280th anniversary of Maksym Żeleźniak, the organiser of Polish and Jewish pogroms in Right Bank Ukraine, will be celebrated. Having declared himself Colonel of Zaporozhye Sich, Żeleźniak exterminated Poles and Jews, citing the non-existent decree of Catherine II. He was caught and sentenced to a lifetime of hard labour. He escaped from Nerchinsk prison, according to one version, then joined the uprising of Emelyan Pugachev. Taras Shevchenko glorified Żeleźniak as a “hero for the national liberation of Ukraine” in the poem “Gaydamak”.
The odious Yubilar list of “outstanding Ukrainians” once included the famous Soviet Amet-khan Sultan Sultan ace pilot and twice Hero of the Soviet Union. On October 25th 2020 Sultan would have been 100 years old. The leader of the anti-fascist Resistance in France and Hero of the Soviet Union Vasily Porik, was also included in the same company with Nazi accomplices. And also the known surgeon Nikolay Pirogov, who was born in Moscow, lived and worked in St. Petersburg and never called himself Ukrainian. Pirogov was included among Ukrainians only because he died in a village that is now a part of the city boundary of Vinnytsia.
The glorification of Nazi henchmen at the state’s expense will take place “in order to consolidate the Ukrainian people and develop their historical consciousness”, as the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Dmitry Razumkov formulated it.
EA Daily
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