The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was founded in 1929 in East Galicia (located in Poland at the time) and called for an independent and ethnically homogenous Ukraine. From the beginning, the OUN had tensions between the young radical Galician students and the older military veteran leadership, who grew up in the more lenient Austro-Hungarian Empire. The younger generation had only known oppression under the new Polish rule and underground warfare. As a result, the younger faction tended to be more impulsive, violent and ruthless.

During this period, Polish persecution of Ukrainians increased and many Ukrainians, especially the youth who felt they had no future, lost faith in traditional legal approaches, in their elders and in Western democracies who were seen as turning their backs on Ukraine. The OUN assassinated Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Pieracki in 1934. Among those tried and convicted in 1936 for Pieracki’s murder, were OUN’s Stepan Bandera and Mykola Lebed. Both escaped when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939.

Support for the OUN increased as Polish persecution of Ukrainians continued. By the beginning of the Second World War, the OUN was estimated to have 20,000 active members and many times that number in sympathizers in Galicia. In 1940 the OUN would split into the OUN-M led by Andriy Melnyk, and OUN-B headed by Stepan Bandera which made up most of the membership in Galicia and consisted mainly of youth.

In August 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the non-aggression pact known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, dividing Poland. Eastern Galicia and Volhynia were reunified with Ukraine, under the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In June 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded Western Ukraine, there were many Western Ukrainians who welcomed the invading Nazis as their ‘liberators.’ It should be noted here that this was not a sentiment predominantly shared by the rest of Ukraine, who fought in or alongside the Russian Red Army against the invading Nazis. Both the OUN-M and OUN-B would spend much of the war collaborating closely with the Germans. They had no issues with the Nazi ideology for they too believed that a solution was found in returning to a ‘pure race.’

In the case of Ukraine, this pure race consisted of a somewhat romanticised concept of ‘ethnic Ukrainian,’ based on the golden age of Kievan Rus’. The OUN believed that the ‘pure ethnic Ukrainian race’ were the only true descendants of the royal bloodline of the Rurik dynasty that ruled Kievan Rus’. And rather than looking at Belarusians and the Russians as their brothers and sisters who shared the same ancestry, the OUN viewed them more so as ‘ethnic impostors’ so to speak of this pure bloodline. This can be seen today with Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups attacking Ukrainian ethnic Russians for the past nine years in Ukraine

If ANYONE ever tells you that Ukraine is worth fighting for... This is showing that their chickens came home to roost.

Oh my gosh...