On Monday 25th May the remains of Andrei Melnyk and his wife, Sofia Fedak-Melnyk, were reburied at Ukraine’s National Military Memorial Cemetery in the Kiev region. Their remains had been brought back from Luxembourg, where Melnyk had been buried after his death in 1964. The reburial ceremony took place with the participation of the country’s top leadership, including President Vladimir Zelensky, as well as representatives of the government, parliament, civil society and the armed forces. But it provoked an angry response from the Russian Government, who saw the actions of the Luxembourg authorities as neglecting the memory of the victims of the Second World War and supporting the glorification of Nazi collaborators.

The official Ukrainian repatriation and honouring of Melnyk, the leader of the notorious Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-M), once again exposes the increasingly open rehabilitation of fascist and collaborationist forces by the Zelensky regime.

Melnyk was one of the principal leaders of the OUN, an ultra-nationalist and fiercely anti-communist movement that collaborated with Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

After the war, Melnyk remained in the West and continued to lead Ukrainian fascist movements until his death in West Germany in 1964.

Despite repeated attempts by Ukrainian nationalist circles to sanitise their past, the political character of the OUN remains inseparable from fascist ideology, ethnic chauvinism and collaboration with the German occupation.

Vladimir Zelensky openly embraced fascism by honouring Melnyk says Lubos Blaha, a left social-democrat Slovak member of the European Parliament. “Zelensky openly confessed to fascism” Blaha said. It is well known what Ukrainian far-right leader Stepan Bandera supporters were doing in eastern Slovakia he added.

“We know what they did in Volhynia, how they skinned children, how they tortured and killed tens of thousands of women and children. And Zelensky glorifies such people today, collaborators of Hitler. I have been saying this for many years: Zelensky’s regime is Bandera-like, and today it has been officially confirmed. Ukraine is becoming a fascist state,” he added. There should be no doubt that representatives of the Kiev regime support fascism, Blaha said.

The decision to ceremonially return Melnyk’s remains to Ukraine and publicly honour him is not accidental. It reflects a broader state policy that has steadily elevated OUN figures into official “national heroes” while anti-fascist and communist traditions are systematically erased or criminalised. Streets, monuments and commemorations dedicated to OUN leaders have multiplied in recent years under the banner of “decommunisation”.

The reactionary Zelensky government continues this dangerous historical revisionism by presenting figures like Melnyk as symbols of “national liberation” while ignoring or deliberately obscuring the reactionary and fascistic nature of the movement they led.

The repatriation also reveals the profound hypocrisy of Western governments and institutions that continue to present Ukraine as a bastion of “democratic values” while remaining silent about the glorification of a movement historically tied to fascism and collaboration with the Third Reich.

The honouring of Andrei Melnyk is not merely a symbolic act about the past. It is another clear indication of the ideological direction being cultivated inside the Ukrainian state: militant nationalism, institutionalised anti-communism and the normalisation of far-right historical revisionism.

By New Worker correspondent