MOSCOW, March 21 – The Russian Foreign Ministry assailed Ukrainian nationalists’ attempts to rehabilitate SS veterans, saying the moves were tantamount to a “shameful act of betrayal” of millions of Nazi victims and would damage Russian-Ukrainian relations.
The ministry statement, released late Wednesday night, followed this week’s decision by the city council of Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine to proclaim 24 veterans of the Nazi SS Halychyna division as fighters for Ukrainian independence. The Halychyna division was created after Nazis occupied parts of Soviet Ukraine in the early part of World War II, and it attracted many ethnic Ukrainians who were hostile to the Soviet regime. After the war, Soviet authorities imprisoned many of the division’s veterans in labor camps as Nazi collaborators. Tensions between Ukrainian nationalists and the Russian minority in western Ukraine remain high.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said that “the rehabilitation of these people would be taken not only by Russians, but also by the majority of the Ukrainian population, as nothing other than a shameful act of betrayal of the memory of millions of civilians, including Russians and Ukrainians, fighters of the Soviet Army, who perished in Hitler-occupied Ukrainian territory and on the fronts of World War II.”
The ministry complained that Ukrainian officials had not expressed adequate opposition to the nationalists’ “provocation,” and warned that rehabilitation of the SS veterans “would reflect negatively on Russian-Ukrainian relations.”
