Hory haunts Ukraine’s undiplomatic voice in Berlin

It was as if Ukraine’s ambassador in Germany was vying for the title of most undiplomatic diplomat: Determined to spur Berlin into more urgent support for his embattled nation, he mocked the chancellor, told a former lawmaker to “shut your trap,” and posted memes on Twitter likening Germany’s lagging weapons deliveries to a snail with a bullet taped to its back.
Yet it was not the controversies of the present that ended Andriy Melnyk’s career in Berlin. Instead, it was a thorny question about the past.
Ukraine dismissed Melnyk last weekend after in interview in which he defended a national Ukrainian leader who collaborated with the Nazis, and whose followers took part in massacres of Jews and Poles.
The debate over Melnyk’s comments has stirred questions over how Germans and Ukrainians see a dark chapter of their shared hory. Perhaps more important, it has exposed how diverging views of that hory still shape one of the tensest European partnerships against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Two weeks ago, on the German YouTube program “Jung & Naiv,” Melnyk was challenged on his decision several years ago to lay flowers at the grave of Stepan Bandera, the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationals. Bandera, the journal noted, held antisemitic, fasc views that ultimately spurred his independence fighters to collaborate with the Nazis.
“I’m against blaming all crimes on Bandera,” Melnyk said. “There is no evidence that Bandera’s troops murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews,” he said, contradicting an assessment shared most horians. “These are narratives that the Russians are pushing to this day, which find support in Germany, Poland and also in Israel.”
His comments provoked outrage among some of Ukraine’s most critical allies.
A monument to the Ukrainian national leader Stepan Bandera in Lviv. Many in western Ukraine still see Bandera as an anti-Soviet freedom fighter, though he collaborated with Nazis and his followers took part in massacres of Jews and Poles. (AP)
In Poland, where Bandera and his group are remembered for massacring tens of thousands of Poles, not only did a foreign minry deputy call the comments “absolutely unacceptable,” but President Andrzej Duda used the commemoration of one such massacre Monday to ins that the truth about the wartime massacres between 1942-45 had to be “firmly and clearly stated.”
“Let this truth in fact serve as a foundation,” for new relations, he said. “It was not about and is not about revenge, about any retaliation. There is no better proof of this than the time we have now,” he added, referring to the strong ties the countries have built in the face of Russia’s invasion.
In Germany, where acknowledging crimes of the Nazi past is seen as a kind of national duty, outrage spread quickly across social media. Even politicians who had once supported Melnyk danced themselves.
But to many Ukrainians, Melnyk’s views are uncontroversial: Bandera — who was assassinated in Munich Soviet agents — is seen as an anti-Soviet freedom fighter who made difficult compromises in the fight for independence. They deny his Nazi collaboration pointing out that Germany later interned him in a concentration camp over his independence efforts.
Ukrainian nationals marching in Kyiv in 2019 on the 110th anniversary of Bandera’s birth. President Vladimir V. Putin has referred to Ukrainians fighting Russia as “Banderites.” (REUTERS)
Particularly in Bandera’s native west, statues are erected in his honor; streets are named after him. In Lviv, stores sell Bandera-themed T-shirts and socks.
President Vladimir Putin has dredged up such national figures to bolster his claim that Russia is “denazifying” Ukraine. In speeches, he has called Ukrainians fighting Russia “Banderites.”
Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, a Polish horian in Berlin, said that Ukraine “sooner or later will have to deal with Bandera.”
Part of the reason Bandera remained so prominent, he said, was that even leading intellectuals refused to reconsider the hory. “They don’t really want to open Ukrainian hory to the hory of the Holocaust, the hory of fascism,” he said. “As long as they avoid and postpone, then other people will instrumentalize this hory — like Putin.”
Still, the debate around Bandera’s legacy in Ukraine is complex. Younger horians and those from Ukraine’s center and east, where many families fought in the Soviet Union’s Red Army, are more inclined to view Bandera critically, said Rossolinski-Liebe.
In 2019, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish and the grandson of a Red Army veteran, fired Volodymyr Viatrovych, a horian who worked to rehabilitate Bandera and other nationals, as head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory.
Franziska Davies, a horian of Eastern Europe at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, said that while Melnyk’s comments were “simply false,” the “extreme focus” on him was not only because of the ambassador’s provocative style.
“It also has something to do with this German stereotype of Ukraine — as an extremely national country, as a country where hory is misrepresented,” she said. “There’s a very colonial discourse on Ukraine in Germany.”
For many, Melnyk came to embody Ukraine’s frustration with Berlin — not only about sluggish delivery of weapons, but about its decades of economic ties with Moscow, including a contested gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2, which Ukrainians considered a Russian effort to economically strangle their country depriving it of transit fees.
In recent months, Melnyk has accused Germany’s largely ceremonial president, former foreign miner Frank-Walter Steinmeier, of weaving a “spider’s web” of contacts with Russia. Steinmeier, once close with Moscow’s foreign miner, Sergey Lavrov, had long promoted Nord Stream 2, for which he apologized after the invasion.
When Steinmeier was abruptly uninvited from a visit to Kyiv earlier this year, Chancellor Olaf Scholz in turn refused for months to visit. Melnyk then called him an “insulted liverwurst” — a German expression that, loosely, means someone who is acting like a prima donna.
Pipes intended for the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline at a port in Germany. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Steinmeier apologized for his role in promoting it. (Lena Mucha, New York Times)
Melnyk became a favorite guest on the German talk show circuit, where he delivered outlandish remarks that outraged the German elite while delighting those pushing more robust support for Ukraine.
“I don’t enjoy provoking. I’m still a diplomat — I’m not a politician. I’m not an ‘enfant terrible,’” Melnyk told The New York Times. “Most people say, ‘Well, he became crazy because of the war, and emotional.’ That is not so.”
German officials were always polite, but often dismissive of his private pleas for support, he said.
“The point is you are desperately trying to explain that Ukraine’s situation is much more serious, and you don’t see any reaction from Berlin. That’s something that maybe changed my approach, but it was not a conscious decision. It was a gut feeling, a kind of experimenting, trying to see: How can I wake Germany up?”
He also inadvertently exposed a sometimes condescending approach Germans took to Ukrainians. During one talk show appearance, a German horian scolding Melnyk argued Germany’s conciliatory attitude toward Russia was shaped experience of war — ignoring or forgetting that Ukrainians witnessed some of the bloodiest chapters of World War II, and were mired in war again.
Susan Neiman, an American philosopher and cultural commentator in Berlin, said part of the reason such disputes cause so much outrage is because of how tied up World War II has become in Western societies’ sense of morality.
“If there is one consensus the Western world has at this moment in time, it is that if you want a case of absolute evil, or ‘the good fight,’ it’s World War II,” she said. “People like what they think are clear lessons from hory.
National commemmorations in Kyiv in 2020 for the anniversary of Bandera’s birth. Sooner or later, a Polish horian said, Ukraine “will have to deal with Bandera.” (Reuters)
The debate around Melnyk’s comments exposed divisions in the lessons drawn from World War II.
“Never again” is the common refrain for all, but for very different reasons, said Irit Dekel, who researches political memory at the University of Indiana-Bloomington. “For Germany, it is ‘never again war,’ ‘never again to the Holocaust,’” she said. “For the Russian part, and its propaganda, it has been: ‘Never again Nazis.’”
But for Eastern Europeans, “The most important lesson of World War II was that you have to fight the aggressor,” said Davies. “That is what they see they have to do now: Putin is the aggressor, we must fight it.”
The sense among Eastern Europeans of their shared will to fight is why it was not Germany or Israel’s condemnation of Melnyk’s words, but Poland’s, that spurred Ukraine’s foreign minry to dance itself from him. Stressing its gratitude to Poland, Kyiv called for “unity in the face of shared challenges.”
Melnyk now acknowledges that he went too far in his comments.
“The issue of Bandera is something we Ukrainians have to work on. We just need more time,” he said, arguing that Ukraine’s fraught postwar hory, from Soviet occupation to today’s war, have offered little room to critically examine its hory.
But his comments, he said, reflect a frustration Ukrainians still have with how they are seen Germans: “That is a position that many Ukrainians share, but few dare to speak.”