In 2020, the Times of Israel published an optimistic article about Drobovych: “Ukraine’s memory czar tones down glorification of war criminals.” It included a picture of the new UINM director standing next to his Banderite deputy, Volodymyr Tylishchak, and NA co‐founder Ihor Kulyk. (Tylishchak is a contributor to the OUN‐B newspaper and part of the “Ukrainian Studies of Strategic Research,” which organizes the annual “Bandera Readings” in Kyiv. This event’s chief organizer, Yuriy Syrotiuk, is the OUN‐B affiliated director of political education for the far‐right Svoboda party, and has been friends with Tylishchak since college.)

[…]

“The course for the future starts from the past,” advised Patryliak, another TsDVR‐affiliated RPR expert on national memory, who once cited former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke as an “expert” on the “Jewish Question,” according to historian Per Rudling. Drobovych was only brave enough to say that Ukrainians should seek “the complicated truth about ourselves,” and “it’s not always a good one.”

In the spring of 2021, Anton Drobovych dared to denounce the annual Nazi march in Kyiv to celebrate the establishment of the Ukrainian division of the Waffen‐SS in 1943. Meanwhile, Pavlo Podobed, Oleg Slabospitsky, and their friend Roman Kulyk — a far‐right activist in the UINM who used to wear neo[fascist] clothing — visited Orest Vaskul, a 94‐year old veteran of the Ukrainian SS who died about six weeks later.

Slabospitsky, a board member of NUMO, shamelessly posed the question to himself on Facebook: “Why do I honor the veterans of the [Ukrainian SS] division ‘Halychnya’?” Waffen‐SS veteran Orest Vaskul received a state funeral in June 2021.

Prominent OUN‐B members such as Volodymyr Viatrovych, the former “memory czar,” and Serhiy Kvit, the former Minister of Education and Science, made sure to pay their respects. It turns out that Vaskul led the OUN‐B network in Ukraine from 1995 until 2010. Earlier this year, a street in Kyiv was named after him.

(Emphasis added, because I know that plenty of anticommunists still deny the neofascism’s privileged status in Ukraine.)

Events that happened today (August 18):

1890: Walther Funk, Reich Minister of Economics, was unfortunately born.
1912: Otto Ernst Remer, Axis general, burdened humanity with his existence.
1916: Neagu Bunea Djuvara, Romanian fascist, arrived to worsen the world.
1933: The Volksempfänger was first presented to the German public at a radio exhibition; the presiding Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, delivered an accompanying speech heralding the radio as the ‘eighth great power’.
1940: The Hardest Day air battle, part of the Battle of Britain, took place. At that point, it was the largest aerial engagement in history with heavy losses sustained on both sides.
1945: Some of the Axis’s last remaining troops prepared theirselves as Soviet forces landed at Takeda Beach on Shumshu Island and launched the Battle of Shumshu; the Soviet Union’s invasion of the Axis’s Kuril Islands commenced. (Coincidentally, Sukarno took office as Indonesia’s first president, following the country’s declaration of independence the previous day.)