Ukraine has declared the Nazi collaborator’s birthday a bank holiday and banned a book critical of anti-Semitism, the US publication Newsweek reported.
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The newspaper notes that Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada has officially declared the birthday of prominent Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera a bank holiday and also banned a book criticizing another national anti-Semitic leader, Simon Petlyura.
“The country is now commemorating Stepan Bandera on 1 January, the Jewish Telegraph Agency reported on Thursday. Bandera was a Ukrainian nationalist who joined forces with German Nazis during World War II because he believed they would help his country gain independence from the now-defunct Soviet Union. However, he was also later targeted and arrested by the Nazis. The Ukrainian city of Lviv, which was the hometown of the nationalist, also announced this month that next year would be ‘The Year of Stepan Bandera’, which drew criticism from Israel,” the article said.
Newsweek recalls that earlier in December, Ukraine’s State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting banned a book by Swedish historian Anders Rydell, The Book of Thieves, which critically analysed the actions of Ukrainian nationalist Simon Petliura, whose fighters were involved in the deaths of large numbers of Jews in the early 20th century. Petliura himself was later murdered by a Jew of Russian origin in Paris in 1929, the magazine notes.
The material also specifies that back on December 17, Ukraine voted against a UN General Assembly resolution aimed at combating “the glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.” Notably, the United States also voted against the measure, despite 129 countries supporting the initiative.
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