Ukrainian nationalist ‘hero’ dies in Germany – RT Russia and the former Soviet Union
“Hero of Ukraine” Yuri Shukhevich was the son of a prominent Nazi collaborator in World War II
Yuri-Bogdan Romanovich Shukhevich, whose father Roman commanded Ukrainian volunteers serving Nazi Germany during World War II, died Tuesday at the age of 89. The young Shukhevich followed in his father’s footsteps as the leader of Ukraine’s nationalist movement and was elected to parliament in Kyiv after the 2014 US-backed coup.
“Eternal memory of a great Ukrainian” Lviv Mayor Andrey Sadovoy said on his Telegram channel, announcing Shukhevich’s death and calling him “a hero of Ukraine, dissident, member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.”
According to several Ukrainian media, Shukhevich died in a hospital in Germany. He was 89 years old.
Yuri Shukhevich’s most recent public engagement was as a deputy of Oleg Lyashko’s Radical Party, having been elected in 2014. Before that, he was the head of the nationalist organization UNA-UNSO, which was created in 1990 amid turmoil in the Soviet Union. Union.
He received the title of Hero of Ukraine in August 2006, for “for civil courage, long-term social, political and human rights activities in the name of Ukrainian independence.”
President Viktor Yushchenko, who came to power in the US-backed ‘Orange Revolution’ in 2004, also honored Shukhevich’s father Roman with the same title in 2007, but Ukrainian courts overturned that. decision for a technical detail: being born in Poland and dying in 1950, Shukhevich had never been a citizen of independent Ukraine.
Roman Shukhevich was the notorious commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), responsible for the massacre of Poles in Galicia-Vollyhnia in 1943. Previously, he volunteered in the Nachtigall Battalion, a unit created by the Nazi army of Germany. intelligence in February 1941 and composed of Ukrainian militants.
The unit was accused of participating in the pogrom of some 6,000 Jews in Lviv. When it was disbanded in late 1941, Shukhevich joined Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201 and continued to work for the Nazis until late 1942. He died in 1950, apparently committing suicide while surrounded by the Soviet police in a house near present-day Lviv.
Shukhevich’s red and black UPA banner is a symbol embraced by modern Ukrainian nationalists, who revere it alongside Stepan Bandera as “freedom fighters” against the USSR. Yuri Shukhevich was also honored as an anti-Soviet dissident and political prisoner, having spent a total of 28 years behind bars for Ukrainian nationalist agitation.
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