photo: Babi Yar, analysis of the belongings of the dead. source: wikipedia
If Ukraine wants to become a member of the European Union, it must stop glorifying those who collaborated with the Nazis. This was stated by the lawyer of the Association of Sons and Daughters of Jews Deported from France , Arnaud Klarsfeld , on BFM TV .
The lawyer supports Ukraine’s admission to the EU. However, in order to become a member of the “European family” legally, the applicant country must return to its history and stop glorifying collaborators.
Klarsfeld recalled Babi Yar in Kiev. Ukrainians named the street leading to it in honor of Stepan Bandera. He is also praised in the schools of Ukraine.
“It’s impossible,” the lawyer said.
Klarsfeld pointed out that “it is impossible to erect a monument in Babi Yar to Jews who were shot not only by the Nazis, but also tens of thousands of Ukrainians”, and at the same time “glorify those who destroyed Jews”.
In the Babi Yar tract, which is located on the outskirts of Kiev, the Nazis and their Ukrainian accomplices staged mass executions during the Great Patriotic War. There they destroyed Soviet prisoners of war, Jews, Gypsies and Kiev Karaites. According to various estimates, from 100 to 200 thousand people died in Babi Yar in two years.
Bandera was the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and one of the main initiators of the creation in 1942 of its combat wing of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (the organization is recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation).
This organization fought against the Soviet troops and collaborated with the Nazis.
In 2015, Petro Poroshenko, who was then president of Ukraine, gave its participants the status of “fighters for independence” of the country and the right to social guarantees. In one of the schools of Mariupol, liberated from Ukrainian nationalists, they found a manual in which Bandera is glorified.