Nazi spectacle in Kyiv

Ukrainian revisionism: Fascist leader Konovalets is exhumed, reburied and welcomed as a hero by Azov nationalists.

President Zelenskyy paying tribute to fascist leader Konovalets -- image via Marta Havryshko on X

By Susann Witt-Stahl, junge Welt, 18 August 2026. Translation and notes by Helmut-Harry Loewen.

With exuberant pomp and nationalist pathos, the 3rd Corps of the Ukrainian Army celebrated the “homecoming” of Yevhen Konovalets. Late on Friday evening, the coffin containing the remains of the first leader of the fascist Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was carried by an Azov honour guard of torchbearers and flag-bearers into the Patriarchal Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Kyiv. Dmitro Kucharchuk, the neo-Nazi head of the 3rd Corps’ ideology department — once a cheerleader for ‘Sieg Heil!’ hooligans — and Georgi Kuparashvili, head of the Yevhen Konovalets Military School opened by Azov in 2016, draped him in the OUN flag during a solemn ceremony. He had been transported in an Austin armoured car from the First World War, which members of the 3rd Corps had restored [1].

Image via junge Welt

The Nazi spectacle was orchestrated personally by the corps commander, whom President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had promoted to brigadier general in 2025. Andriy Biletsky [2] welcomed the funeral procession bearing Konovalets’s coffin at the entrance to the cathedral with a speech: “Today, two generations come together here,” said the “White Führer” of the Azov movement. He recalled Konovalets as commander of the Sych rifle unit, formed in 1917 by the (short-lived) Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Ukrainian Military Organisation (UWO), the forerunner of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), founded in 1929, and paid tribute to his own followers, who have been operating as a state within a state since the Maidan in 2014, as his successors.

Andriy Biletsky, Mykhailo Drapaty (the new Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces), and Denys Prokopenko at the reburial of Yevhen Konovalets.

What went unmentioned, as in all speeches honouring the national hero, was that Konovalets was an ally of Hitler until his assassination in 1938 by a Soviet agent, and that the UWO, later the OUN, collaborated with the intelligence services of the German Reichswehr and, from 1935, the Wehrmacht. According to historians such as Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe [3], following a meeting with Hitler in 1933, Konovalets appealed to Ukrainians to support the “Führer” because he would “open the doors to the East.” There is also evidence that Konovalets was an antisemite. In 1934, he called for a crackdown on “mixed marriages with Jews” as “enemies of our rebirth.” And on the first anniversary of Konovalets’s death, his organisation promised “revenge” against the “Russian-Jewish reptiles who have been sucking our blood for centuries.”

None of this has prevented the Ukrainian establishment from unleashing a wave of adoration for Konovalets (Konowalez-Fetischisierung) across the country. The media are falling over themselves with reports of politicians, military figures, clergy and other pillars of Ukrainian society parading past the coffin laid out in the church — with a guard of honour from the Ukrainian armed forces — or kneeling before it. “For decades, attempts were made to erase his name, distort it or consign it to oblivion,” declared Kirilo Budanov, head of Zelenskyy’s presidential office, on Sunday. “The enemies of an independent Ukraine feared the colonel during his lifetime — and still fear him to this day.”

Konovalets’s remains were exhumed on 11 August at the Crooswijk Cemetery in Rotterdam and transferred to Ukraine two days later. The procedure was organised at the highest level — by Budanov, the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, as well as former Azov officer Olexander Alferov. Konovalets’s remains will now be temporarily interred at the National Military Memorial Cemetery until they can be transferred to the Pantheon of Heroes, the construction of which was approved by Zelenskyy’s cabinet on 1 July.

“Each of the previous generations inherited the Ukrainian cause whilst it was still unfinished,” declared Biletsky. “We are the first to have a genuine chance to break these heavy chains and complete the work of the Colonel and all our great predecessors.” The 3rd Corps explained exactly what this meant on its official social media channels: “The empire that murdered him will be destroyed!”

Notes

[1 Recent repatriation and reburial ceremonies of prominent antisemites and fascists in Ukraine have been organised at the highest levels of the Ukrainian state, as Witt-Stahl observes. Genocide scholar Dr. Marta Havryshko has described this disgraceful state of affairs as follows: “Zelensky is paying tribute to yet another antisemite: Yevhen Konovalets, a Nazi collaborator and leader of the OUN. It was under Konovalets’s leadership that the OUN developed its antisemitic agenda. … His own views, together with the antisemitism of other OUN leaders, ultimately found their expression in the pogroms of the summer of 1941 and in collaboration with Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. Today, President Zelensky — a man of Jewish descent whose grandfather served in the Red Army, defending Soviet Jews from Nazi extermination — is paying tribute to Konovalets and, through him, to the OUN as a whole. Again. And once again, Europe will look the other way, pretending that Ukraine has no problem with honoring people who embraced fascist ideology, participated in the Holocaust, and were implicated in mass war crimes against civilians. Zelensky’s Jewishness has become a fig leaf for the apologetics of Nazism in Ukraine — met with a standing ovation from the West.” X. August 18, 2026.

[2] Andriy Biletsky, commander of the Azov-rooted Third Assault Corps, has a long history of involvement in fascist politics. In 2007 he stated that "Ukrainian racial social-nationalism" was the ideology of Patriot of Ukraine. In 2010 he stated that the mission of the Ukrainian state is to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade ... against Semite-led Untermenschen (subhumans).” In 2013 he wrote a brochure called The Word of the White Leader. Biletsky’s colleague, Denys Prokopenko, commander of the Azov Brigade, was also involved in fascist activities since his youth. The Czech Communist Member of the European Parliament, Kateřina Konečná, described Prokopenko as "a neo-Nazi and football hooligan of Dynamo Kyiv." The journalist Lev Golinkin, in an article, “The Western Media Is Whitewashing the Azov Battalion” (The Nation, June 13, 2023), wrote that Prokopenko "came out of the White Boys Club," a group of football hooligans in Kyiv, whose Facebook posts praised Holocaust perpetrators and displayed Waffen-SS insignia. During his time in Azov, his platoon was nicknamed Borodach Division. The platoon's insignia was the SS Totenkopf (death’s head), a popular neo-Nazi symbol. Biletsky and Prokopenko accompanied Mykhailo Drapaty, the new Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, to the reburial of Konovalets. Another organiser of this event, Kirilo Budanov, head of Zelenskyy’s presidential office, is the former head of the Ukrainian military intelligence directorate and a former senior official of the country’s foreign intelligence agency. As Marta Havryshko notes: “Apparently, this is what historical memory looks like when inconvenient history is not confronted but dressed in uniform, decorated with state honors, and marched proudly into the present.”

[3] Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe is a German Polish historian at the Freie Universität Berlin whose book publications include Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist. Fascism, Genocide, and Cult (2014), The Fascist Kernel of Ukrainian Genocidal Nationalism (2015), the co-edited volume Fascism without Borders. Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe 1918 to 1945 (2017), and volumes in Polish and German.

Original article: Nazispektakel in Kiew. Ukrainischer Revisionismus: Faschistenführer Konowalez exhumiert, überführt und als Held von »Asow«-Nationalisten in Empfang genommen.  Susann Witt-Stahl, junge Welt, 18.08.2026.