George McKay

Zelensky glorifies as Ukrainian hero Melnyk, whose OUN faction collaborated with Nazis in massacres of about 100 Jews in my high school in Western Ukraine, 34,000 Jews in Babi Yar, residents of several Polish villages, Warsaw uprising supression & other massacres of Jews, Poles & Ukrainians researchgate.net/publication/33… My book chapter: "Even though two factions of the OUN often acted as rivals and resorted to killing one another, many OUN-M leaders, who served as police commanders and were likely involved in the mass murder of Jews and Ukrainians, were given commanding positions after they joined the UPA. For example, Ivan Kediulych, one of OUN-M leaders in Western Ukraine, became a commander of a territorial unit in the UPA-West. In the fall of 1941, he and other OUN-M leaders were the organizers and commanders of the Kyiv Kurin and the city police in German-occupied Kyiv. There were other OUN-M members who served in the police or OUN-M marching groups, in particular, in the Bukovynian Kurin that organized local police, and who later joined the UPA. First OUN-M organizers of Kyiv police and some units under their command arrived in Kyiv before the shooting of nearly 34,000 Jews in Babyn Yar (Babi Yar) in the end of September 1941. There is evidence of the involvement of these police units in this and other mass shootings of Jews and Ukrainian and Russian civilians and POWs in Babyn Yar and other locations in Kyiv City. In many cases, it remains not entirely clear whether collaboration of OUN-B and UPA leaders with the German intelligence and security agencies was informal or whether it was formal, as was the case with at least some of the leaders of OUN-M marching groups, such as Bohdan Onufryk (Konyk) and Stepan Suliatynsky, who used their formal service in an Abwehr Special Detachment (Sonderkommando) to organize local police and administration in the cities and regions of Kyiv, Poltava, and Kharkiv in the fall of 1941. In these and a large number of other locations in Central, Eastern, and Southern Ukraine, the police assisted in the mass murder of Jews, Ukrainian and Russian civilians, and POWs... A platoon (chota) of the 31st SMdS battalion (Schutzmannschaft Battalion of SiPo), which was also called the Ukrainian Self-Defense Legion, deserted to the UPA in the middle of 1944, and a significant number of its commanders and members served in the UPA before joining this unit, which was organized by the SD and the OUN-M in Volhynia in the end of 1943. However, most of this battalion was incorporated into the SS Galicia Division. While a number of them were prosecuted in the Soviet Union and Poland, the majority of this battalion’s servicemen found refuge after the end of the war in such countries as the UK, the US, and Canada. A large proportion of commanders and members from the 31st security police and SD battalion served in the local militia and police in the Kremenets, Lutsk, and Volodymyr-Volynsky areas when these formations assisted in mass murder of Jews, Ukrainians, and Poles. For example, Mykola Nedzevedsky, who was the town and regional police commandant in Kremenets in 1941–1943, served as an UPA commander after he was forced to join it along with many other members of his OUN-M unit in July 1943 and before most of them deserted and joined the SiPo Battalion 31 in December 1943. Most of the Volodymyr-Volynsky police, which was under informal control of the OUN-M and the OUN-B and participated in local mass shootings of more than 20,000 Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians, joined the UPA in 1943. A significant proportion of several dozen members of this battalion from the Volodymyr-Volynsky area worked in the police and the SiPo/SD there, and many of them also were later in the UPA. For, example, Petro Glyn was one of several 31st battalion commanders and members, who served in the police or in the SiPo/SD in the town of Volodymyr-Volynsky and nearby locations and can be identified by name. Glyn also was an adjutant of an UPA company commander in the same area. The main UPA formation there, called Sich, was comprised mostly from former policemen from Volodymyr-Volynsky and neighboring towns and districts, and its commander (Porfyrii Antoniuk) was a police commander in Volodymyr-Volynsky and Olevsk before he joined the UPA in the spring of 1943."