Stepan bandera biography

Stepan Andriyovych Bandera was a Ukrainian far-right leader of the radical militant wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the OUN-B.
The Ukrainian ultranationalist who allied with Nazi Germany during WWII has experienced a resurgence in popularity because of his struggle.
Elucidating the circumstances in which Bandera and his movement emerged and functioned, Rossolinski-Liebe explains how fascism and racism impacted on Ukrainian.

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Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian anti-hero glorified following the Russian invasion

By Thomas d’Istria (Kyiv, Lviv, special correspondent)Published on January 12, 2023, at 8:46 pm (Paris), updated on January 12, 2023, at 9:20 pm

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InvestigationThe Ukrainian ultranationalist who allied with Nazi Germany during WWII has experienced a resurgence in popularity because of his struggle against Russia and the Soviet Union.

For the last number of years, there has been one regular event every time January 1 rolls around. On that day, Ukrainian far-right activists march through the streets of Kyiv to celebrate the birth of Stepan Bandera (1909-1959), a controversial figure of Ukrainian 20^th-century nationalism. In 2023, however, the streets of Kyiv remained silent because of the martial law in effect forbidding demonstrations in times of war.

The celebration was marked silently, but it still managed to trigger yet another controversy around the past with Poland. It originated with the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament, tweeting a photo of the commander-in-chi

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The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist is the first comprehensive and scholarly biography of the Ukrainian far-right leader Stepan Bandera and the first in-depth study of his political cult. In this fascinating book, Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe illuminates the life of a mythologized personality and scrutinizes the history of the most violent twentieth-century Ukrainian nationalist movement: the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

Elucidating the circumstances in which Bandera and his movement emerged and functioned, Rossolinski-Liebe explains how fascism and racism impacted on Ukrainian revolutionary and genocidal nationalism. The book shows why Bandera and his followers failed—despite their ideological similarity to the Croatian Ustaša and the Slovak Hlinka Party—to establish a collaborationist state under the auspices of Nazi Germany and examines the involvement of the Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust and other atrocities during and after the Second World War. The author brings to light some of the darkest elements of mod

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Stepan Bandera: Hero or Nazi collaborator?

"Bandera is our father, Ukraine is the mother. We will fight for Ukraine!" sings a young woman in camouflage uniform, carrying a machine gun, in a video that Ukrainian defenders in Mariupol shared on social networks in early May.

The video seems to have been recorded in a bunker at the Azovstal Steelworks, the city's last stand for Ukrainian resistance to Russian troops. "Azov" fighters were on site, too, a regiment founded by radical nationalists that was later put under Ukraine's Interior Ministry.

Stepan Bandera, killed by Soviet intelligence agents in West Germany more than 60 years ago, is probably the best-known Ukrainian nationalist. His name became a symbol long before the war that Russia has been waging against Ukraine since February 24.

For parts of Ukraine society, Bandera is a hero and role model. Russian propaganda portrays him as an enemy against whose supporters they have been fighting for decades. Russia's military regards the use of his name as a kind of clue to literally hunt down Ukrainians in the occupied te