Ukraine's leading English-language newspaper since 1995

While Shukhevych’s status as Hero of Ukraine is questionable, it’s time the Jewish community quit being pawns of the Soviet,now Russian, propaganda machine.

hat Russian-speaking Jews from throughout the world wished to hold their first parliamentarians' conference in Kyiv, and that they felt comfortable doing so, says a lot about how Ukraine has progressed since independence.

In the past, numerous conference participants called for President Viktor Yushchenko to rescind his Hero of Ukraine award given posthumously to Ukrainian General Roman Shukhevych.

Prior to leading the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fought both the Nazi Germans and the Soviets during the Second World War, Shukhevych led the Nachtigal battalion, a western Ukrainian military unit formed by the Wehrmacht’s famous Brandenburger regiment.

A widely held view is that any degree of collaboration with the Nazi Germans was an evil act, whatever the ultimate goal. Shukhevych’s defenders claim Ukraine’s fledgling army needed to gain Nazi military expertise and assistance in order to fight the Soviets, gain independence and thwart Communism.

Certainly, Yushchenko giving Shukhevych Ukraine’s highest honor last year served to divide Ukraine further rather than create unity.

But what is now beyond doubt is that no evidence currently exists that Shukhevych or any of the 300 Nachtigal troops engaged in any mass killing of Jews during its brief combat tour in July and August 1941.

Prominent Ukrainian historians Ihor Yukhnovskiy and Volodymyr Viatrovych recently returned from the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem, confirming it has no evidence of Jewish persecution committed by Shukehvych or his command, as had been alleged several times by Yosef Lapid, chair of the Yad Vashem Council.

While Shukhevych’s status as Hero of Ukraine is certainly questionable, it’s time the worldwide Jewish community, known for its high standards in scholarship, quit being pawns of the Soviet, and now Russian, propaganda machine.

Much of the Soviet propaganda against the Ukrainian independence movement, currently exploited by Russia’s authoritarian government and Russian-oriented parties in Ukraine, has turned out to be lies and fabrications.

In echoing these distortions, Yad Vashem dented what had been an impeccable reputation.

Instead of over-relying on Russian scholarship, distorted by Soviet nostalgia and post-Soviet nationalism, Jewish scholars should consider Ukrainian scholarship, and that of other post-Soviet satellite states, as a more reliable and objective record of events during those horrid days.