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Stepan Bandera, present hero of the Ukraine nation, was born on the 1st of January, 1909 in the old Austro-Hungarian Galizian lands (now part of modern Ukraine). Determined politician, he was a Ukrainian far-right activist and theorist of the militant wing (OUN-B), who served as head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists dedicated to the independence of Ukraine. When the second World conflict ignited and Operation “Barbarossa" (22nd of June, 1941) was unleashed by Hitler and his Axis allies, the Wehrmacht rolled East victoriously through the borders of the USSR including Western Ukraine. There the German armies saw multiple welcoming committees composed by beautiful Ukrainian women in national costumes offering flowers to the marching soldiers. Towns were decorated with Swastikas and portraits of Adolf Hitler marked the main streets. The Wehrmacht was being received as a liberator from the Soviet yoke. But how come an invading power received such a warm welcoming? Well, there were mixed feelings about having foreign troops in Ukrainian soil, but Bandera's sympathizers saw it as a unique chance to carry on a dreamed political project: the creation of the Ukrainian state. Stepan Bandera took advantage of this opportunity to pursue his plans to expel the Soviets in the first place (and other ethnics later on) in order to finally establish his dreamed Ukrainian country. In turn the Germans saw these exalted nationalists as a very useful manpower and started using them as police units or even para-military forces to round up and eliminate “undesirable elements” such us Jews, Gipsies, Communists, etc.. At that stage it seemed that Bandera’s objectives and Hitler’s coincided, as the former had carte blanche for an ethnic cleansing operation to “purify” the multi-ethnic Ukraine, under the approval of the new Teuton bosses. During World War II, Reichskommissariat Ukraine (abbreviated RKU) was the civilian occupation regime of much of Nazi-occupied Ukraine (which included adjacent areas of modern-day Belarus and pre-war Second Polish Republic). Between September 1941 and August 1944, the Reichskommissariat was administered by Erich Koch as the Reichskommissar. The administration's tasks included the pacification of the region and the exploitation, for German benefit, let us repeat, for the German benefit of its resources and people. Here, of course, Bandera’s and the Führer’s interests clashed. Adolf Hitler issued a Führer Decree defining the administration of the newly occupied Eastern territories on 17 July 1941. He wanted to rule its eastern conquered territories like he believed Britain had been ruling India (he was largely an admirer of the English). Consequently the Germans should bar the Slavs from any education. Teaching Ukrainians how to read would merely produce “semi-educated” people, who would be dissatisfied and anarchistic. A university in Kiev was out of the question, and the Germans should “not allow anything to be published.” All the Führer would agree to was music for the masses and a religious life, easy to control. The German Army was accompanied on their entry into Lvov on June 30 by members of OUN-B, the Bandera's movement, who that same day proclaimed the restoration of Ukrainian statehood and the formation of a provisional state administration; within days the organizers were arrested and interned in concentration camps (as were both Bandera and, later, Melnyk). Far from supporting Ukrainian political aspirations, the Nazis in August attached Galizia administratively to Poland, returned Bukovina to Romania, and gave Romania control over the area between the Dniester and Southern Bug rivers as the province of Transnistria, with its capital at Odessa. The remainder was organized as the Reichskommissariat Ukraine as explained above. As the German armies pushed to the East in summer’41, they found less and less support from the populace, turning the initial acceptance to total resistance and hatred. But as Army Group “South” (one of the 3 Army Groups launched in “Barbarossa”) was heading towards the Donbass and the Caucasus, SS formations called Einsatzgruppen showed up trailing behind the regular troops with a different task. A very “special” one. According by Encyclopedia Britannica, an estimated 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews perished, and over 800,000 were displaced to the east; at Baby Yar (near Kiev), nearly 34,000 were killed in just the first two days of massacre in the city. These Einsatzgruppen were aided at times by auxiliary forces recruited from the local population. These auxiliaries were engaged in the mission of rounding up ethnic/political elements that we have referred to above in order to “eradicate” them. Yes, Bandera’s followers helped or even directly carried out the brunt of these tasks. When the Germans invaded the USSR in June 1941 and captured the East Galician capital of Lvov, Bandera’s lieutenants promised to work closely with Hitler, then helped to launch a pogrom that killed four thousand Lvov Jews in a few days, using weapons ranging from guns to metal poles. “We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,” a pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews. But Bandera’s aspirations conflicted naturally with those of the Third Reich, which did not have any intention to create any independent Ukrainian nation for no one. The Germans arrested Bandera for his intransigence on the issue of independence, but released him in 1944 when it appeared that his popularity with Ukrainians might help stem the Soviet advance. But whatever their disappointment with the Germans, the Banderites never disagreed with their Jewish policy, which eventually killed over 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews. The shared common view on “subhumans” has reached our days in the present war between Zelensky and Putin. Ukrainian political activity, predicated originally on cooperation with the Germans, increasingly turned to underground organizational work and resistance. The OUN groups that streamed eastward in 1941 were soon subjected by the German authorities to repressive measures, including execution, so they propagated their nationalist views clandestinely and, through their contact with the local population, began to revise their ideology in a more democratic, pluralist direction. In eastern and central Ukraine, secret Communist Party cells maintained an underground existence, and a Soviet partisan movement developed in the northern forests. Early in 1942 began the formation of nationalist partisan units in Volhynia, and later in Galizia, that became known as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainska Povstanska Armiia; UPA). As well as conducting guerrilla warfare with the Germans, the Soviet partisans and the UPA fought each other. In mid-1943 the Germans began their slow retreat from Ukraine and in November the Soviets reentered Kiev. With the approach of the front, guerrilla activity in western Ukraine intensified, and bloody clashes that claimed large numbers of civilian victims occurred between Ukrainians and Poles. So in July, 1943, started another savage clash that happened when the constituted UPA and volunteers attacked ethnic Polish civilians in the Volhynia region (Northwest Ukraine). The dramatic events ended up with the massacre of an estimated number of 100,000 ethnic Poles. The brutality of the killings surpass all imagination as no distinctions were made among the women, the children, the elderly or the men. Citing the Polish historian Grezegorz Motyka, Rossoliński-Liebe says that the UPA killed close to 100,000 Poles between 1943 and 1945 and that even Orthodox priests blessed the axes, pitchforks, scythes, sickles, knives, and sticks that the peasants it mobilized used to finish them off. It is fair to say that Bandera was not directly involved in those massacres as at that time he was in German captivity, although it cannot be ruled out that they would have occurred anyways had he been present. To this day this event has not been forgotten in Poland. Only during the month of August’ 22, at the time of writing these lines, Polish nationalists have demanded President Zelensky’s government to recognise the atrocities as genocide and to ask for forgiveness to the Polish nation. So far this has not happened. “When it comes to the Polish question, this is not a military but a minority question,” a Polish underground source quoted a UPA leader as saying. “We will solve it as Hitler solved the Jewish question.” In spring 1944 the Red Army began to penetrate into Galizia, and by the end of October all of the territory was again under Soviet control. After the war Bandera lived in Munich. British intelligence used him to help run agents into Ukraine to gather intelligence and to help the Ukrainian underground against the Soviets. The CIA used some of Bandera’s former cronies for similar reasons, but never used Bandera himself, owing to Bandera’s infatuation with his own legend. Therefore the UPA and other groups of Ukrainian nationalists continued their guerrilla warfare after the defeat of National-Socialist Germany in 1945. Since the new “boss” dictated this time from Moscow, the UPA carried out attacks against the Soviets; but not to forget other ethnics. The UPA, under the leadership of Roman Shukhevych (killed in 1950), continued effective military operations against Soviet troops until the early 1950s. In 1954 Soviet Premier Nikita Krushev (an ethnic Ukranian himself) annexed the Crimean peninsula to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Finally for this controvert leader, in 1959 Bandera was assassinated by a Soviet agent. And in this fashion on the 25th of December, 1991, the Soviet regime collapsed. Like born again from the ashes of Communism, the Ukrainian parliament declared its independence on the 24th of August, 1991, (with the Crimean peninsula attached as part of its dominions as it was given by Krushev). In spring 2022 Zelensky’s regime recovered Bandera’s figure as a national hero. Statues of this leader can be seen now in many locations across the territory. Those monuments of the Red Army that defeated Hitler have been taken down along with anything that has to do with the Russian culture. Undoubtedly the most ultranationalistic circles acting in today’s Ukraine have an inspiration on Stepan Bandera’s ideals, goals and methods. For them a hero. What is evident is that his radical Nazi methods and fashion have been recovered, put into practice by political parties (Social-Nationalist Party -Svoboda-) and radical organizations such as Pravy Sektor, Azov, C-14, Aidar, Kraken…some which emerged to support the Maidan coup in 2014. Many joined their ranks and violence spread rapidly especially against ethnic Russians. These paramilitary groups surrounded by an aura of a reborn nazi ideology and paraphernalia, have been incorporated by Zelensky into the Ukrainian regular...