Ukraine has rolled out full state honors for the remains of a World War II Nazi collaborator who has been repatriated from Luxembourg and will be buried in Kiev’s main military cemetery. The controversial exhumation comes around a month after Vladimir Zelensky announced plans to establish a “pantheon of outstanding Ukrainians.”
According to the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, the coffins containing Andrey Melnik, the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), and his wife, Sofia Fedak-Melnik, entered the country in a solemn ceremony – which involved a national choir and embroidered flags – in Uzhgorod, western Ukraine.
It was attended by Irina Vereshchuk, the deputy head of Zelensky’s office, as well as local officials, members of the clergy, and veterans.
The remains will be sent to Kiev, where they will be reburied at the National War Memorial Cemetery on Sunday – with more pomp and circumstance planned.
Zelensky said on Tuesday that Ukraine has a “moral duty” to bring home those who “defended the idea of independence,” adding that preparations are underway for the exhumation of other figures, including OUN founder Evgeny Konovalets.
In late April, Zelensky announced that work had begun on creating “a Pantheon of outstanding Ukrainians,” saying the primary focus will be on the return of historical figures who are “of fundamental importance for the formation of Ukrainian national consciousness and for our state-building.”
Who was Melnik?
Andrey Melnik co-founded the OUN in 1929 and became the leader in 1938, following the assassination of its chief, Evgeny Konovalets, by Soviet intelligence. Around the same time, Melnik was recruited by Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service (the Abwehr) for espionage and sabotage operations ahead of the planned invasion of the Soviet Union, according to Nuremberg trial documents.
Under Melnik’s leadership, the OUN split into two parts in 1940, with one part led by notorious Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, who was later involved in ethnic cleansing in Nazi-occupied territories.
After the invasion of the Soviet Union, Melnik’s relations with the Nazis soured as Germany was in no hurry to give any semblance of independence to Ukraine. Melnik was placed under house arrest in mid-1941, then arrested by the Gestapo in January 1944 and held in Sachsenhausen concentration camp before being released that October as German forces retreated.
As the war ended, Melnik fled to the West and settled in Luxembourg, where he remained active among Ukrainian emigre networks until his death in 1964.
The OUN leader was not tried in the Nuremberg tribunal as it was mainly focused on major Nazi war criminals. The Western allies refused to hand him over to the Soviet Union for trial, arguing that he himself was a Nazi victim due to his time in a concentration camp.
How did Russia respond?
On Thursday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Ukraine is seeking to assemble “Nazi collaborationists and human-hating scum” from around the world to glorify them.
Zakharova asked whether Zelensky forgot to mention that those being honored “killed people on ethnic grounds,” and predicted that Bandera – whose faction was linked to the mass killing of tens of thousands of Poles in Volyn – would be next in line for repatriation.
She suggested that Kiev is trying to divert the public’s attention away from growing war fatigue, the conscription campaign, and corruption scandals involving Zelensky’s inner circle.