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Wolodymyr
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Yushchenko
seeks freedom fighter status for nationalist veterans
Oct 14, 2006
KYIV. Oct 14
(Interfax) - Ukrainian
President Viktor Yushchenko has initiated measures to
grant the status of independence fighters to veterans
of the former western Ukrainian militant nationalist group that was
active from the 1920s to the early 1950s.
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
(OUN) was created in Poland in the 1920s and its military wing,
the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), was set up on October 14,
1942. The Western
regions of Ukraine, divided
between Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania before World
War II, were the center of the Ukrainian nationalist movement during
and after the war. The UPA
fought the Nazi army, the Polish Armia Krajowa and
the Soviet Red Army, while during the Nazi occupation
some UPA units were used in punitive operations against Soviet
partisans. The UPA continued to
fight Soviet and Polish communist authorities until the early
1950s. Large forces from the Soviet
security police, the NKVD, fought the UPA in a confrontation that
involved extreme brutality on both sides.
On Friday, Yushchenko's political adviser Taras
Stetskiv told a roundtable in Kyiv that the president would do
his best to have OUN-UPA veterans declared fighters for Ukrainian
independence. Yushchenko himself
said during a visit to Sumy region, Ukraine, on Saturday:
"As president, I am not authorized to define the status [of
OUN-UPA veterans]. But I can induce
the government, including the parliament, to give consideration
to this issue." "This is the
purpose of the decree that I signed this morning," he
said. Left-wing and
pro-Russian groups oppose having UPA
veterans declared either independence fighters or World War II
veterans. They say the UPA fighters were bandits who
fought against ordinary Ukrainians, not just the Soviet authorities.
Sviato
UPA
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