natykarp wrote:I'm concerned with Ukraine now openly celebrating their Nazi heroes such as Stepan Bandera and others who killed hundreds of thousands of polish and jews during WW2. The whole civilized world is against nazism, how is it even possible that this happening in Ukraine?
All countries have some portion of the population with extreme far-right views, but Ukraine actually has far fewer of them than most. Already in 2018, Ukraine was the least antisemitic country in Central and Eastern Europe:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2 ... tlaws_map/ Ukraine is the only country in Europe whose head of state is Jewish (elected with 73% of the vote). Furthermore, in the last election, a coalition of all far-right parties won 2.15% of the popular vote, and since that didn't meet the threshold of 5% failed to gain any parliamentary seats.
Bandera championed Ukrainian independence from both Poland and Russia through armed resistance (this part a lot of people agree with), but a lot of his ideology was reprehensible and clearly fascist. It is however worth noting that, in regards to your earlier statement, Bandera never supported killing Jews or Poles, and certainly never "killed hundreds of thousands". He believed that Jews support Soviet communism, and that Poles support Ukraine being a part of Poland, and that an independent Ukraine would be at war with both. Those who are familiar with and genuinely support Bandera's ideology are a fringe minority. Far more of us use Bandera for trolling Russians. Bandera himself has become a boogeyman for Russians ever since Russian propoganda pioneered the notion of Nazis in Ukraine as a pretext for invading and cleansing it. Russians today refer to Ukrainians fighting them as "Banderas", in contrast to "good" Ukrainians who support Russia. If you saw the amount of nonsense spouted by Russian news about Ukraine's supposed love for Bandera, you'd understand our amusement with trolling Russians over it. So yes, in Lviv after the invasion Moscow St was renamed to Bandera St, and yes, it was hilarious.