Ukrainian Nazis Celebrate Hitler Collaborator Stepan Bandera’s Birthday Instead of New Year on January 1

Jan. 2, 2022 (EIRNS)—Saturday wasn’t just New Year’s Day in Ukraine. It was also the birthday of Stepan Bandera, an occasion that was observed by the Right Sector, which held a torchlight parade in Kiev. “Today, when there is a war with the occupier at the front, and the struggle against the ‘fifth column’ continues in the rear, we remember and honor the memory of Stepan Bandera,” said Andriy Tarasenko, leader of the nationalist party Right Sector, reported the Times of Israel.

According to TASS, the Israeli embassy in Kiev vigorously protested the event. “Israel condemns the nationalist march in honor of Stepan Bandera. Any attempt to glorify those who supported Nazi ideology defiles the memory of Holocaust victims in Ukraine,” the embassy statement said. “We are demanding thorough investigation of the anti-Semitic manifestations that took place during the march in accordance with the law adopted in Ukraine in 2021.”

Expressions of admiration for Bandera and other collaborators have increased in scope and status following the 2014 revolution in Ukraine, which toppled the elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych “amid claims that he is a Russian stooge,” and “triggered an armed conflict with Russia,” Times of Israel reported (referring to Yanukovych as having headed a “regime”). The veneration of Nazi collaborators—including killers of thousands of Jews, Poles, Russians, and anti-Nazi Ukrainians—is a growing phenomenon in Eastern Europe, where many consider such criminals as heroes because they ostensibly resisted Soviet Communism. The first post-coup prime minister of Ukraine in 2014, installed by the State Department’s Victoria Nuland and Ambassador to Kiev Geoffrey Pyatt, was pro-Nazi Arseniy Yatsenyuk, whom Nuland nicknamed “Yats,” boasting how the State Department had ponied up $5 billion for the coup.