In a conversation, the Ukrainian ambassador Andriy Melnyks commented on the former nationalist leader Stepan Bandera. The statements are not well received at home. The Foreign Ministry is distancing itself from its representative on the matter.
The Ukrainian foreign ministry has distanced itself from statements made by the ambassador in Berlin, Andriy Melnyk, about former nationalist leader Stepan Bandera (1909-1959). "The opinion of the Ukrainian Ambassador to Germany Andriy Melnyk, which he expressed in an interview with a German journalist, is his personal and does not reflect the position of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry," a source in Kyiv said.
In the statement, which was written in English, the Foreign Ministry also thanked Warsaw for the current "unprecedented help" in the war against Russia. It literally says: "We are convinced that relations between Ukraine and Poland are currently at their peak."
In Poland, Melnyk's statements were met with criticism. The ambassador defended Bandera in the conversation in question, saying: "Bandera was not a mass murderer of Jews and Poles." There is no evidence for that. As ambassador, Melnyk reports to the Foreign Ministry.
Bandera was the ideological leader of the radical wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Nationalist partisans from western Ukraine were responsible for ethnically motivated expulsions in 1943, in which tens of thousands of Polish civilians were murdered. Bandera fled to Germany after World War II, where he was murdered in 1959 by an agent of the Soviet secret service, the KGB.
