Donetsk, Aug 22 - DAN. The incumbent Kiev regime is lionising the Ukrainian nationalists convicted at Nuremberg trials for participating in the massacre of Jews during World War II, Donetsk People’s Republic parliamentarian Oleg Onopko told the Donetsk News Agency on Thursday.
“We know that Ukrainian nationalists were involved in the Holocaust. The Nuremberg tribunal convicted them for it. The incumbent Ukrainian regime is aware of it, yet it is trying to redeem and even heroize the ideologists of Ukrainian nationalism, divert attention from their crimes,” Onopko said. “Hence the accusations alleging the concealment of Holocaust information by the USSR, the renaming of streets in honour of notorious nationalists and the ousting of the Russian language from all possible spheres of public life.”
He noted that intensive “nation building” has been underway in Ukraine since 2014, based on rejection of everything which is Russian or Soviet in history and culture. “They are building an imaginary world of their own with its own “historical memory and heroes,” Onopko said.
In this connection, any arguments with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky or other Ukrainian nationalists over history are senseless and unproductive.
“While Ukraine might have changed its government, the values and ideology have remained the same,” Onopko said.
On August 20, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky greeted, in Babiy Yar, Ukrainian nationalists who took part in the genocide against Jews during WWII.
Babiy Yar is a place of mass executions known all over the world together with Auschwitz, the most frightening Holocaust symbol. It is also Ukraine’s largest international cemetery where Nazis and Ukrainian nationalists executed 150,000 to 200,000 people, according to different sources.*jk