Fury as Ukraine names soccer stadium in honour of Nazi collaborator responsible for mass murder
A decision to name a soccer stadium in Ukraine in honour of a Nazi collaborator responsible for mass murder has provoked fury in Israel and Poland.
Joel Lion, Israel’s Ambassador to Ukraine, said that Israel strongly condemned the city of Ternopil for its decision to name the newly rebuilt stadium as the Roman Shukhevych Stadium. Mr Shukhevych was a nationalist leader who commanded a number of units that actively collaborated with the Nazis during World War II and were responsible for massacres of Jews and Poles.
On Twitter, Mr Lion wrote: “We strongly condemn the decision of Ternopil City Council to name the city stadium after the infamous Hauptman of the SS Schutzmannschaft 201…and demand the immediate cancellation of this decision.”
Meanwhile, Poland’s Ambassador to Ukraine, Bartosz Cichocki, cancelled a visit to Ternopil, making iit clear in a letter to the Council leader that his “last-minute” decision to cancel was a protest at the city’s decision.
As commander of the Nazi-controlled, Ukrainian battalion, known as Nachtigall, Mr Shukhevych was involved in the widely-documented slaughter of Jews in Lvov (now Lviv) in 1941, as well as massacres of Jews in the vicinity of Vinnytsia. Another of his military units, the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army), was said to have massacred 100,000 Poles. He was also deputy commander of the 201st Schutzmannschaft Battalion, responsible for slaughters in Belarus.
Mr Shukhevych, who was shot in 1950 by Soviet authorities attempting to arrest him, is regarded as a hero by some Ukrainian nationalists, many of whom deny that the battalion was involved in the 1941 Lvov slaughter. In 2007, he was posthumously named “Hero of Ukraine,” the country’s highest honour.
In response to the protests, Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Twitter that “preserving the national memory” of Ukrainians remained “one of the priorities of Ukraine’s state policy”, adding that “discussions in this area should be held at the level of historians” while “diplomats should work to strengthen relations of friendship and mutual respect.”
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