KIEV, Jan. 23 - President Viktor Yushchenko, in a move likely to embarrass the two rivals fighting to succeed him, on Friday elevated a controversial wartime nationalist leader to the status of hero of Ukraine.
Yushchenko issued a decree conferring the honor on Stepan Bandera, the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which fought against both Nazi invaders and Soviet forces in World War II and after.
“Millions of Ukrainians have waited for this for many years,” Yushchenko said Friday after announcing the decree.
Yushchenko now has no chance of a second term in office, and his rehabilitation of Bandera was a decisive move to square the issue away before he stepped down.
Yushchenko, in his decree, referred to Bandera’s “demonstration of heroism and self-sacrifice in fighting for an independent Ukrainian state.”
It will pose a problem for opposition leader Viktor Yanukovych and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who face off in a presidential vote February 7. To their discomfort, they may now have to take up a position on the highly sensitive issue of Bandera’s status.
Bandera was responsible for the proclamation of an Independent Ukrainian State in Lviv on June 30, 1941. His forces fought the Soviets in western regions of Ukraine long after the end of the World War II.
On October 15, 1959, Bandera was found barely alive outside of Kreittmayrstrasse 7 in Munich. A medical examination established that the cause of his death was poison, apparently by cyanide gas.
On October 20, 1959 Bandera was buried in the Waldfriedhof Cemetery in Munich.
Two years later, on November 17, 1961, the German judicial bodies announced that Bandera's murderer had been KGB defector Bohdan Stashynsky, who acted on the orders of Soviet KGB head Alexander Shelepin and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.
After a detailed investigation against Stashynskyi, a trial took place from October 8 to October 15, 1962. The sentence was handed down on October 19, in which Stashynskyi was sentenced to eight years imprisonment.
The Federal Court of Justice of Germany confirmed at Karlsruhe that in the Bandera murder, the Soviet secret service was the main guilty party.
The Soviet Union actively campaigned to discredit Bandera and all other Ukrainian nationalist partisans of World War II.
In an interview with Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda in 2005 former KGB Chief Vladimir Kryuchkov claimed that "the murder of Stepan Bandera was one of the last cases when the KGB disposed of undesired people by means of violence." (ap/nr/ez)
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