Even the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has rejected the statements made by its Ambassador Melnyk about the nationalist leader Bandera. These can no longer be listened to on the Tiktok video platform. A statement from the company is pending. The interviewer speaks of censorship.
In the debate about Ambassador Andriy Melnyk's statements about the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera, Tiktok apparently blocked the relevant part of the video interview. Tilo Jung, who conducted the interview, wrote on Twitter: "Censorship of journalism: Melnyk clip on Bandera violates 'community rules'". The company promised a statement in the course of the morning, as reported by the media service “Turi2” and “Spiegel”.
Most recently, the federal government's anti-Semitism commissioner, Felix Klein, criticized the Ukrainian ambassador. His statements "nourished the Russian narrative in the current conflict and tend to cause division and a lack of understanding among friendly states," Klein told the Funke media group. Melnyk defended Bandera in the conversation in question, saying: "Bandera was not a mass murderer of Jews and Poles." There is no evidence for that.
Even the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry had distanced itself from the statements. "The opinion of the Ukrainian Ambassador to Germany, Andriy Melnyk, which he expressed in an interview with a German journalist, is his personal one and does not reflect the position of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry," a statement from Kyiv said.
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 Munich in 1959 by an agent of the Soviet secret service KGB.
