Servicemen belonging to a far-right Ukrainian military unit have held a torch-lit farewell ceremony in Kiev for Evgeny Konovalets, the founder of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which collaborated with Nazi Germany.
Konovalets’ remains were exhumed at a cemetery in the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands earlier this week and delivered to Ukraine on Wednesday. They will be temporarily reburied at the National Military Memorial Cemetery outside the capital.
After dark, fighters of the 3rd Army Corps staged a farewell ceremony for the Nazi collaborator at a cathedral in central Kiev.
The unit was formed earlier this year by members of the Azov nationalist movement, which stems from the neo-Nazi Azov regiment that emerged in 2014 during Kiev’s crackdown on Donbass. The regiment faced repeated accusations of war crimes, including torture, rape, and looting, from the UN and international NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
Велике повернення великого Провідника: полковник Євген Коновалець — на рідній землі!Минулої ночі через майже 90 років на цвинтарі Кросвейк у Роттердамі засновник ОУН та командир Січових Стрільців, полковник Євген Коновалець, повернувся до України.На почесну варту до… pic.twitter.com/gwGBqqedlz
The coffin with Konovalets’ remains was driven to the cathedral in a historic Austin armored vehicle from the period of the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922. It was greeted at the scene by two rows of troops, holding torches in their hands.
The unit’s commander Andrey ‘White Leader’ Biletsky hailed Konovalets and claimed that the current generation of Ukrainian fighters should accomplish the objectives he fought for.
Konovalets fought the Soviet Union during the Russian Civil War as a colonel in the army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, and led the OUN from its founding in 1929 until he was killed by Soviet agent Pavel Sudoplatov in Rotterdam in 1938. According to declassified documents, a group of Ukrainian nationalists that he led – codenamed ‘Consul I’ – supplied German intelligence with data on Poland from 1925 and moved into “espionage and sabotage” work inside the Soviet Union after 1939.
The reburial of Konovalets is part of a push by Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky to build a “Pantheon of outstanding Ukrainians,” which he says will fulfill a “moral duty” to bring home those who “defended the idea of independence.” Kiev has already reburied several Nazi-linked figures, including another OUN leader, Andrey Melnik, in May.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova previously blasted efforts to reinter Konovalets, accusing Zelensky of “dancing on the bones” of those who fell victim to the OUN and once again confirming the “misanthropic essence” of his government.
While Moscow has long condemned Kiev for glorification of Nazi collaborators, Zelensky’s campaign also triggered a diplomatic rupture between Ukraine and Poland. The dispute erupted after he decided to name a special forces unit ‘Heroes of the UPA’, in honor of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which killed more than 100,000 Poles during the 1943–1945 Volhynia massacres.
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