Banderite

Bandera escaped from prison after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939,[1] and moved to Kraków, the capital of Germany's General Government in the German-occupied zone of Poland, where he established close connections with the German military.[15]

Since 1939, the OUN had been led by Andriy Atanasovych Melnyk, a founder member. He had been chosen for his more moderate and pragmatic stance; his supporters admired Mussolini's fascism but condemned Nazism. However, a younger and more radical Nazism-supporting faction of the OUN were dissatisfied.

On 10 February 1941, a conference for OUN leadership was held in Kraków, Poland. The radical contingent refused to accept Melnyk as head of the OUN and instead named Bandera. This led to the split of the OUN in the spring of 1941 into two groups: OUN-B (Banderites), who were more militant, younger and supported Bandera, and OUN-M (Melnykites), who were generally older and more ideological. In February 1941, Bandera became the leader (Providnyk) of the OUN-B faction or the Banderivtsi.[1]

After the start of the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 (Operation Barbarossa), the OUN-B in the person of Yaroslav Stetsko declared an independent Ukrainian state on 30 June 1941 in occupied Lviv, while the region was under the control of Nazi Germany,[16] pledging to work closely with Germany, which was presented as freeing Ukrainians from Russian oppression.[17] In response, the Nazi authorities suppressed the OUN leadership. In July 1941, Bandera himself was arrested and sent to a concentration camp in Germany. He was imprisoned there until 1944.

In October 1942, during Bandera's imprisonment, the OUN-B established the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).[18][5][1] The OUN-B formed Ukrainian militias that carried out pogroms and massacres, both independently and with support from the Germans.[3][1] To ensure the maximum impact of the systematic ethnic cleansing campaign in the contested territory, the OUN-B faction spread antisemitic, racist, and fascist propaganda among the ordinary peasants and other Ukrainians.[3]^: 235-236[19] Aided by Stetsko, Shukhevych, and Lenkavskyi (OUN-B propaganda chief), Bandera wrote a manifesto entitled "Ukrainian National Revolution" that called for the annihilation of so-called ethnic enemies. The manifesto informed the locals how to behave and included specific instructions about the killing of Jews, Poles, and Ukrainian opponents of fascism.[3]^: 237

Bandera did not participate in pogroms; he remained in the area of occupied Kholmshchyna (Polish Chełm Land) further north-west.[3]^: 237

The vast majority of pogroms carried out by the Banderites occurred in Eastern Galicia and Volhynia, but also in Bukovina.[3]^: 237 The most deadly of them was perpetrated in the city of Lviv by the people's militia formed by OUN at the moment of the German arrival in the Soviet-occupied eastern Poland.[20] There were two Lviv pogroms, carried out in a one-month span, both lasting for several days; the first one from 30 June to 2 July 1941, and the second one from 25 to 29 July 1941.[21] The first pogrom took the lives of at least 4,000 Jews.[22]

In late 1944, Bandera was released by the German authorities and allowed to return to Ukraine in the hope that his partisans would unite with OUN-M and harass the Soviet troops, which by that time had handed the Germans major defeats. Germany sought to cooperate with the OUN and other Ukrainian leaders. According to Richard Breitman and Norman Goda in Hitler's Shadow, Bandera and Stetsko refused to do this, and in December 1944 they fled Berlin, heading south.[9][nb 1]

In February 1945, at a conference of the OUN-B in Vienna, Bandera was made the representative of the leadership of the Foreign Units of the OUN (Zakordonni Chastyny OUN or ZCh OUN). At a February meeting of the OUN in Ukraine, Bandera was re-elected as leader of the whole OUN. It was decided by the leadership that Bandera would not come back to Ukraine, but remain abroad and make propaganda for the cause of the OUN. Roman Shukhevych resigned as the leader of the OUN, and became the leader of OUN in Ukraine.[23]^: 288

In Soviet secret records, the word "Banderites" for the first time emerged in late 1940 and began to be used in Soviet propaganda starting in late 1942.[3][9] The term became a crucial element of the Soviet propaganda discourse and was used as a pejorative description of Ukrainians, sometimes all western Ukrainians in the most negative way.[9][10] Historian Andrii Portnov noted that "The common noun "Banderivtsi" ("Banderites") emerged around the time of ethnic cleansing of the Polish population in Volhynia, and it was used to designate all Ukrainian nationalists, but also, on occasion, western Ukrainians or even any person who spoke Ukrainian."[11]

The term has been used by Russian state media against Euromaidan activists to associate a separate Ukrainian national identity with the most radical nationalists.[12][24][11] Today, in Russian propaganda, the word is used to refer to all in Ukraine who back the idea of sovereignty from Russia; Ukrainian nationalist collaboration with Nazi Germany is also emphasized.[9]