Пам'ятник Степанові Бандері | |
49°50′9.5″N24°0′20.5″E / 49.835972°N 24.005694°E | |
Location | Kropyvnytskyi square, Lviv, Lviv Oblast, Ukraine |
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Builder | Ukrainian Government |
Material | Granite |
Beginning date | 2003 |
Completion date | 13 October 2007 |
The Stepan Bandera monument in Lviv, which stands in front of the Stele of Ukraine Monument, is a statue dedicated to Stepan Bandera, a controversial twentieth century Ukrainian symbol of Nationalism, [1] in the city of Lviv, one of the main cities of Western Ukraine.
The figure stands in front of the Stele of Ukrainian Statehood. The monument was unveiled in 2007. [2] [3] [4] for the eve of the holiday of the Intercession of the Theotokos. The full monunment was finished in 2011. [5]
The Statue in Lviv was part of increased Ukrainian Nationalism in Western Ukraine that led to recognition of Stepan Bandera as a National hero. [6]
Bandera was a Ukrainian nationalist leader born in 1909, imprisoned in Poland in his twenties for terrorism, freed by the Nazis in 1939 following the invasion of Poland, and arrested again by the Gestapo in 1941, spending most of the rest of the war in a concentration camp. After the war, he settled in exile in West Germany, where he was assassinated in 1959 by KGB agents.
Stepan Bandera has also been cast as a Nazi collaborator. [7] [8] [9] [10] However, many Ukrainians hail him as a national hero [7] [11] or as a martyred liberation fighter. [12]
The history of Stepan Bandera is hard to separate from fact or fiction. [13] It was illegal to discuss or research Bandera and the OUN-B in the Russia, Poland, and Ukraine until the fall of Soviet Union. [14] A constant tension defining Bandera as a hero and villain has existed since 1944 [15] but has increased with lead up to war in Ukraine. [16]
The monument is a larger than life statue of Stepan Bandera standing 7 meters tall. Behind it is the Stele of Ukrainian Statehood—a 30 meter tall triumphal arch with 4 columns, each column symbolizing a different period of the Ukrainian statehood. The first one—Kievan Rus', the second—the Cossack Hetmanate, the third—the Ukrainian People's Republic, and the fourth—the modern, independent Ukraine. [2]
External image | |
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The monument in 2010 |
Planning for the project began in 1993. [17] Funding of the statue was provided by Lviv Oblast [18] and veterans of the UPA. [19] Due to a shortage of funds only the statue was revealed for the 65th Anniversary. [20]
A design competition was held in 2002 and sculptor Mykola Posikira and architect Mykhailo Fedyk won from a total of seven entries. [21] Construction began in 2003. [22]
Stepan Bandera is seen as a hero to some and a Nazi collaborator to others. [23] [24] [25] [26] Much of this controversy emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union and increased Ukrainian Nationalism as part of Independence and growing tension before the Russia's invasion of Ukraine. [27] Stepan Bandera as National symbol became prominent in Western Ukraine [28] while Russian media drew connections to historical ties the UPA and OUN-B had with Nazi Germany. [29]
Critics of Bandera as a national symbol point to the role of the UPA in the massacre of 100,000 Polish people Volhynia and Eastern Galicia during World War Two. [30] Stepan Bandera the faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B). [24] [25] On 30 June 1941, shortly after Lviv came under the control of Nazi Germany in the early stages of the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, the OUN-B declared an independent Ukrainian state in the city. [31] OUN members subsequently took part in the Lviv pogroms. [32] Russian media uses this historical connection to Ukrainian-led genocide to cast Ukrainian nationalists as nazis. The Simon Wiesenthal Center considers Bandera to be a Nazi Collaborator and harshly criticized the decision by Ukrainian Parliament to designate the birthday of Nazi Collaborator Bandera as a national holiday. Officials in Israel regard Bandera as a Nazi collaborator and in Poland, Bandera is also considered a collaborator to the Nazi atrocities during WWii, responsible for the pogroms carried out by OUN-B and UPA in polish teritorries, which are now parts of Western Ukraine. The need for denazification was given as a Russian pretense for the escalation and full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, following the events of the 2014 Maidan riots and toppling of the democratically elected president of Ukraine and subsequent civil war in the Donbas region. Russian concerns are that honouring Bandera through monuments and national holidays is evidence of high-level infiltration by far-right extremist into the government, and that allowing this to spread will lead to ethnic cleansing of the ethnic Russian population in the East of the Dnieper river, which is based on the events following the Maidan riots of 2014 and subsequent death of more than 11 000 people during the new government crackdown on the Donbas region. Far-right paramilitary and military formations have often displayed symbols either honoring Bandera or the OUN, along with Nazi symbols such as the Wolfsangel insignia. [33]
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 Insurgent Army was a Ukrainian nationalist paramilitary and partisan formation founded by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists on 14 October 1942. During World War II, it was engaged in guerrilla warfare against Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and both the Polish Underground State and Polish Communists. It conducted the massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.
The Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists was a Ukrainian nationalist organization established in 1929 in Vienna, uniting the Ukrainian Military Organization with smaller, mainly youth, radical nationalist right-wing groups. The OUN was the largest and one of the most important far-right Ukrainian organizations operating in the interwar period on the territory of the Second Polish Republic. The OUN was mostly active preceding, during, and immediately after the Second World War. Its ideology has been described as having been influenced by the writings of Dmytro Dontsov, from 1929 by Italian fascism, and from 1930 by German Nazism. The OUN pursued a strategy of violence, terrorism, and assassinations with the goal of creating an ethnically homogenous and totalitarian Ukrainian state.
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Andriy Atanasovych Melnyk was a Ukrainian military and political leader.
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Mykola Kyrylovych Lebed or Lebid, also known as Maksym Ruban, Marko or Yevhen Skyrba, was a Ukrainian nationalist political activist and guerrilla fighter. He was among those tried, convicted, and imprisoned for the murder of Polish interior minister Bronisław Pieracki in 1934. The court sentenced him to death, but the state commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. He escaped when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. As a leader of OUN-B, he was responsible for the massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.
Ukrainian People's Revolutionary Army, also known as the Polissian Sich or the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, was a paramilitary formation of Ukrainian nationalists, nominally proclaimed in Olevsk region in December 1941 by Taras Bulba-Borovets, by renaming an existing military unit known from July 1941 as the UPA-Polissian Sich. It was a warlord-type military formation without a strict central command. From spring 1942 until the autumn of 1943, it acted against the German rural civil administration and warehouses, from spring 1943 it also fought against Soviet Partisans and some units against Poles; from July–August 1943, it clashed with OUN-B Bandera's UPA and UB units.
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Neither Stepan Bandera or the OUN are a symbols of the current Ukrainian government. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is not presenting Bandera or war criminals as national heroes. Nevertheless, the memory of Bandera can be found in Ukraine.
There are few figures in Ukrainian history as controversial as Stepan Bandera, and fewer still are able to influence so profoundly modern politics more than six decades after their death. Bandera, who died in 1959 after being poisoned by Soviet agents, is seen as a national hero who fought for Ukrainian independence during the 1930s and 1940s. To others, he is a war criminal whose nationalist forces carried out atrocities against Jews and Poles during WW2.
.. who followed the terrorist Stepan Bandera (page 104) .. These hopes were almost immediately dashed and many leaders (including Bandera in Krakow) were arrested by the Germans. Nonetheless, both wings of the OUN largely continued to work with the Nazis (page 104) .. Stepan Bandera, the leader and ideological mentor of the nationalist murderers of Poles and Jews (page 249)