Thousands of Ukrainians rally on Stepan Bandera’s birthday
Ukrainians have rallied in a number of cities across Ukraine on what would have been the 111th birthday of one of the ideologists of the Ukrainian nationalist movement.
The traditional torchlight procession on the 111th birthday of Stepan Bandera involved, according to various estimates, between one and several thousand nationalists and sympathizers. Participants bore torches, flags of the All-Ukrainian Union “Freedom”, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, and various Cossack organizations, and chanted nationalist slogans, the Ukrainian service of Radio Liberty reports.
In Lviv there was a people’s assembly, and representatives of the government, political and public organizations laid flowers on Bandera’s memorial.
There was also a torchlight march in Dnipro (formerly Dnipropetrovsk), attended by as many as 500 people.
Stepan Bandera is a Ukrainian political figure, one of the ideologists and theorists of the Ukrainian national movement of the 20th century. In 1959 he was killed in Munich by KGB agent Bohdan Stashynsky.
Ukrainian nationalists consider him one of the most important figures in the country’s history. Russia, Israel and Poland criticize the Ukrainian government for making a hero out of him. He has been accused of complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Poles and Jews in western Ukraine.