BERLIN — It was as if Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany was competing for the title of most undiplomatic diplomat: Determined to push Berlin into more urgent support for its warring nation, he mocked the chancellor, told a former lawmaker to “use your trap,” and posted memes on Twitter comparing the German arms shipments to a snail with a bullet on its back.
Yet it was not the controversies of the present that ended Andriy Melnyk’s career in Berlin. Instead, it was a thorny question about the past.
Ukraine fired Mr Melnyk last weekend then in an interview in which he defended a nationalist Ukrainian leader who collaborated with the Nazis and whose followers took part in massacres of Jews and Poles.
The debate over Mr Melnyk’s comments has raised questions about how Germans and Ukrainians see a dark chapter of their shared history. Perhaps more importantly, it has shown how divergent views on that history still shape one of the most tense European partnerships against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Two weeks ago, on the German YouTube program “Jung & NaiveMelnyk was challenged several years ago for his decision to lay flowers at the grave of Stepan Bandera, the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Bandera, the journalist noted, held anti-Semitic, fascist views that ultimately pushed his independence fighters to collaborate with the Nazis.
“I’m against blaming Bandera for all crimes,” said Mr. Melnyk. “There is no evidence that Bandera’s forces killed hundreds of thousands of Jews,” he said, contradicting an assessment shared by most historians. “These are stories that push the Russians to this day and find support in Germany, Poland and also Israel.”
His comments sparked outrage from some of Ukraine’s most critical allies.
In Poland, where Bandera and his group are remembered for massacring tens of thousands of Poles, a foreign ministry deputy not only called the comments “absolutely unacceptable”, but President Andrzej Duda used Monday’s commemoration of such a massacre to insisting that the truth about the wartime massacres between 1942 and 1945 should be “stated firmly and clearly”.
“In fact, let this truth serve as the basis,” for new relationships, he said. “It was not about and is not about revenge, about any retaliation. There is no better evidence for this than the time we have now,” he added, referring to the strong ties the countries have built in the face of the Russian invasion.
In Germany, where recognizing crimes from the Nazi past is seen as a kind of national duty, outrage quickly spread across social media. Even politicians who had once supported Mr Melnyk distanced themselves.
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But for many Ukrainians, Melnyk’s views are undisputed: Bandera – who was murdered in Munich by Soviet agents – is seen as an anti-Soviet freedom fighter who made difficult compromises in the fight for independence. They deny his cooperation with the Nazis by pointing out that Germany later imprisoned him in a concentration camp for his independence efforts.
Especially in the west of Bandera, statues are erected in his honor; streets are named after him. In Lviv, shops sell Bandera-themed T-shirts and socks.
President Vladimir V. Putin has brought out such nationalist figures to back up his claim that Russia is “de-nazifying” Ukraine. In speeches, he called the Ukrainians fighting against Russia “Banderites.”
Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, a Polish historian in Berlin, said Ukraine “will have to deal with Bandera sooner or later”.
Part of the reason Bandera remained so prominent, he said, was that even leading intellectuals refused to rethink history.† “They don’t really want to open up Ukrainian history to the history of the Holocaust, the history of fascism,” he said. “As long as they avoid and delay, other people will instrumentalize this history — like Putin.”
Yet the debate over Bandera’s legacy in Ukraine is complex. Younger historians and those from central and eastern Ukraine, where many families fought in the Soviet Union’s Red Army, are more likely to take a critical look at Bandera, Rossolinski-Liebe said.
In 2019, President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish and the grandson of a Red Army veteran, fired Volodymyr Viatrovych, a historian who worked on the rehabilitation of Bandera and other nationalists, as head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance.
Franziska Davies, a historian of Eastern Europe at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, said that although Mr. Melnyk were “simply incorrect”, the “extreme focus” on him was not just because of the provocative style of the ambassador.
“It also has something to do with this German stereotype of Ukraine – as an extremely nationalist country, as a country where history is misrepresented,” she said. “There is a very colonialist discourse about Ukraine in Germany.”
For many, Mr Melnyk was the embodiment of Ukraine’s frustration with Berlin – not just over the slow arms supply, but over its decades-long economic ties to Moscow, including a controversial gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2, which Ukrainians viewed as a Russian attempt to economically strangle their country by depriving it of transit duties.
In recent months, Mr Melnyk has accused Germany’s largely ceremonial president, former Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, of weaving a ‘spider web’ of contacts with Russia. Mr Steinmeier, who once had a good relationship with Moscow’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, had long promoted Nord Stream 2, for which he apologized after the invasion.
When Mr Steinmeier was abruptly uninvited to visit Kiev earlier this year, Chancellor Olaf Scholz in turn refused a visit for months. Melnyk then called him an “offended liverwurst” – a German expression that, loosely, means someone who behaves like a prima donna.
Melnyk became a favorite guest on the German talk show circuit, where he made bizarre comments that outraged the German elite, while rejoicing at those who supported Ukraine more strongly.
“I don’t like to provoke. I’m still a diplomat – I’m not a politician. I’m not an “enfant terrible,” Mr. Melnyk told The New York Times. “Most people say, ‘Well, the war drove him crazy and emotional.’ That is not true.”
German officials were always polite, but often dismissive of his personal pleas for support, he said.
“The point is that you try desperately to explain that the situation in Ukraine is much more serious, and you don’t see any response from Berlin. That may have changed my approach, but it wasn’t a conscious choice. It was a gut feeling, a kind of experimenting, trying to see: how can I wake up Germany?”
He also inadvertently revealed a sometimes condescending approach from Germans to Ukrainians. During a talk show appearance, a German historian who scolded Mr. Melnyk argued that Germany’s conciliatory attitude to Russia was shaped by wartime experiences — ignoring or forgetting that Ukrainians have some of the bloodiest chapters of World War II. experienced and once again engaged in war.
Susan Neiman, an American philosopher and cultural commentator based in Berlin, said part of the reason why such disputes are causing so much outrage is because World War II has become mired in the moral sense of Western societies.
“If there’s one consensus that the western world has right now, it’s that if you want a case of absolute evil or ‘the good fight’, it’s World War II,” she said. “People like what they think are clear lessons from history.”
The debate surrounding Mr Melnyk’s comments revealed divisions in the lessons learned from the Second World War.
“Never again” is the common refrain for everyone, but for very different reasons, said Irit Dekel, who studies political memory at Indiana-Bloomington University. “For Germany it’s ‘never again war’, ‘never the Holocaust’,” she said. “For the Russian part and its propaganda it was: ‘Never more Nazis.'”
But for Eastern Europeans, “The main lesson of World War II was that you have to fight the aggressor,” Ms Davies said. “That’s what they see they have to do now: Putin is the aggressor, we have to fight that.”
The sense among Eastern Europeans of their shared will to fight is why it was not Mr Melnyk’s condemnation by Germany or Israel, but Poland’s, which prompted the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry to distance itself from him. Kiev emphasized its gratitude to Poland and called for “unity in the face of shared challenges”.
Mr Melnyk now admits that he went too far in his comments.
“The issue of Bandera is something that we Ukrainians need to work on. We just need more time,” he said, arguing that Ukraine’s fraught post-war history, from Soviet occupation to today’s war, has left little room for critical examination of its history.
But his comments, he said, reflect a frustration Ukrainians still have with how they are perceived by Germans: “That’s a view many Ukrainians share, but few dare to speak out.”