A court in Moscow has ruled that the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and 10 historical figures of the Ukrainian nationalist movement collaborated with Nazi Germany in crimes against Soviet citizens during World War II. Russian state media reported the ruling on August 4.
The Tverskoy District Court in Moscow granted a lawsuit filed by Russia's Prosecutor General's Office. Those named include OUN political leader Stepan Bandera and UPA commander Roman Shukhevych, along with Andriy Melnyk, Mykola Arsenych, Taras Borovets, Dmytro Klyachkivsky, Mykola Kozak, Myron Matviyeiko and Yaroslav Stetsko.
Citing Russian and Belarusian archival material, the Prosecutor General's Office claims OUN and UPA committed crimes including the Lviv pogrom, Babyn Yar, Khatyn and what it calls the Volyn massacre, as well as crimes against Jews, partisans and residents of Belarus.
Previous rulings against the organizations
OUN and UPA had previously been declared extremist organizations in Russia, but this marks the first time a Russian court has ruled specifically on Bandera and Shukhevych individually.
OUN was a political organization of Ukrainian nationalists that fought for an independent Ukrainian state. UPA was an armed partisan formation of Ukrainian nationalists active during World War II and the postwar period, operating mainly in western Ukraine under the political control of Bandera, with the stated goal of creating an independent Ukraine free of Polish, Soviet and Nazi German control.
Some OUN figures sought cooperation with Germany early in World War II, but these efforts failed. The occupying authorities reacted negatively to the June 30 proclamation in Lviv of the Act of Restoration of the Ukrainian State, and many figures in the nationalist movement faced persecution or execution.
Historical disputes over the claims
Claims that OUN or UPA took part in the killing of Jews at Babyn Yar or of residents at Khatyn do not correspond to historical fact. The Volyn events, which Poland and Russia describe as a massacre and which Ukrainian historians describe as a tragedy affecting both peoples, involved mass killings of the Polish population of Volyn in 1943 and 1944, for which Poland holds UPA responsible. Ukrainian historians acknowledge the mass killings of Poles in Volyn while also noting that Ukrainian residents suffered significant losses during the Ukrainian-Polish conflict in the region.
Russia's use of historical policy
Russian authorities use historical policy to accuse Ukraine's current leadership of "Nazism." Russian courts have also recently ruled that the actions of Nazi occupying forces on Soviet territory constituted "genocide of the Soviet people," a term that did not appear in the 1946 Nuremberg trials, which found many Nazi actions criminal without using that designation.
