The Ukrainian youth bike rally devoted to the memory of Stepan Bandera will go pass through southern Poland, despite protests. Bandera is seen as a hero by some Ukrainians, but in Poland he is remembered as a dangerous terrorist responsible for brutal murders of many Polish officials and civilians in 1930s.
Joanna Najfeld reports
Bandera was a leader of an illegal Ukrainian movement in Poland in the thirties and a founder of an Ukrainian Insurgent Army, responsible for brutal operations against Poles in the forties, when more than 100 thousand Polish civilians were brutally murdered. This Ukrainian activist from the first half of the XX century, considered a nationalist or even a fascist by some Poles and is, meanwhile, praised as a patriot and an example for youth in some parts of Ukraine.
The Ukrainian youth bike rally “On the Stepan Bandera’s European traces” started on August 1, in Chervonohrad in Western Ukraine, and runs later through Sanok, Krakow and Auschwitz, finishing in Munich at Bandera’s grave. The initiative raised protests in Poland. Przemyslaw Zurawski, Political Science PhD., says the Stepan Bandera rally can be used by Russian special services to provoke conflict between Poland and Ukraine.
The rally is expected in Krakow on the 8th of August. It also remains to be seen whether Germans will admit the rally into their country.
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