- May 24, 2026
- 8:17 pm
- Ukraine
Simon Petliura — an inconvenient hero and a complex historical figure. For Ukraine, he is associated with the army, the UNR, and the struggle against Moscow. For Israel, he is linked with Jewish pain, pogroms, murder in Paris, and the question of historical responsibility.
Simon Petliura was killed almost a hundred years ago. But his name has returned to the Ukrainian conversation not as a date from a textbook, but as a nerve of today’s war.
Ukraine is once again at war with Moscow. Once again proving that it is not a ‘borderland’, not a buffer, not part of a foreign empire, but a separate state with its own army, memory, and right to a future.
And here Petliura’s phrase “Do not forget the sword” sounds not like an old political metaphor.
It sounds like a warning.
For Ukraine, Petliura is one of the symbols of a generation that tried to maintain independence after the collapse of the Russian Empire. He was the head of the UNR Directory, the chief ataman of the Ukrainian People’s Republic’s troops, and a man who understood very early on: statehood without armed force quickly turns into a plea to the enemy for mercy.
But for Israel, this story cannot be only Ukrainian.
Here, Petliura’s name immediately opens another layer: Jewish pogroms, Samuel Schwarzbard, Paris, trial, accusations, Soviet propaganda, and the question that remains painful: where does personal guilt end and where does the political responsibility of a leader for chaos he could not stop begin?
That is why talking about Petliura today should not be poster-like.
Not a ‘holy hero’.
Not an ‘eternal culprit’.
But more complex. More honest. More mature.
Petliura and Ukraine: why the ‘sword’ has become the main argument again
The Ukrainian People’s Republic did not survive. That’s a fact.
But the UNR did something else: it proved that Ukraine exists as a political nation. Not as folklore, not as a region, not as an appendix to Moscow, but as a subject capable of creating a government, army, diplomacy, cultural institutions, and its own international agenda.
Petliura became one of the faces of this attempt.
He was not an ideal politician. Around him were many tragedies, mistakes, defeats, and decisions that historians still debate. But in one thing he was surprisingly modern: he understood that independence cannot be defended only with declarations.
Paper does not stop an army.
Words do not shoot down missiles.
Allies’ promises do not replace one’s own ability to hold the front.
Ukraine after February 24, 2022, knows this all too well. When Russian troops advanced on Kyiv, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, and the south of the country, it turned out that everything is decided not by beautiful formulas, but by people with weapons, command, logistics, drones, artillery, air defense, and the will of society not to surrender.
Petliura spoke of the ‘sword’ in another century.
But the meaning remains the same.
A state that wants to live must be able to defend itself.
For Israel, this logic is immediately understandable.
An Israeli reader does not need a long explanation of why strength sometimes becomes not a choice, but a condition of existence.
Israel is built on the understanding that a people threatened with destruction cannot fully depend on foreign guarantees. Diplomacy is important. Alliances are important. International law is important.
But if a state has no strength, its right to life is quickly discussed by others.
Ukraine is now at exactly such a point. Putin’s Russia is not just arguing about territories. It is trying to prove that Ukraine has no right to be separate from Moscow in civilization, politics, and memory.
Therefore, Petliura’s ‘sword’ is not a romanticization of war.
It is a survival formula.
Why Moscow has always feared Ukrainian subjectivity
Petliura was dangerous for Moscow not only as a military leader. Even more so as a symbol.
He reminded: Ukrainian independence did not appear by chance in 1991. It was not a ‘gift’ of the USSR’s collapse and was not a ‘Western project’, as Russian propaganda repeats today.
It had predecessors.
There were the Central Rada, the UNR, the Directory, the army, diplomacy, emigration, memory, resistance. There were people who lost the war but did not allow the very idea to disappear.
That’s why Russia so aggressively attacks Ukrainian history. It’s not enough for it to seize territories. It needs to prove that Ukraine ‘never existed’.
Petliura breaks this scheme.
He is inconvenient for Moscow because he shows the long line of Ukrainian struggle: from the UNR to modern Ukraine, from Petliura’s army to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, from the attempt to hold Kyiv in 1919 to the defense of Kyiv in 2022.
And this is no longer just history.
It is a political weapon of memory.
The Israeli knot: Petliura, Schwarzbard, and Jewish pain
But then the hardest part begins.
If writing about Petliura for a Ukrainian audience, one can talk at length about the UNR, the army, emigration, the struggle against the Bolsheviks, and the European choice.
For Israel, this is not enough.
Because in Jewish memory, Petliura’s name is associated not only with Ukrainian independence. It is associated with pogroms.
And this topic cannot be bypassed with cautious silence.
Jewish pogroms in Ukraine during the revolution and civil war were a real catastrophe. People died. Communities were destroyed. Families fled, hid, lost loved ones. For many Jews, it was not a ‘complex era’, but a personal and family trauma passed on further — already in emigration, in Europe, in Palestine, in Israel.
Therefore, an honest conversation must begin with acknowledgment: the pain was real.
Not a Soviet invention.
Not a propaganda myth.
Real.
But acknowledging the reality of the pogroms does not mean automatically accepting the Soviet caricature of the entire Ukrainian struggle for independence.
Here lies the complexity.
Paris, 1926: shots that turned into a historical trial
On May 25, 1926, Simon Petliura was killed in Paris by Samuel Schwarzbard.
For Schwarzbard, it was revenge. He considered Petliura responsible for the deaths of Jews during the pogroms in Ukraine. The trial of Schwarzbard quickly became not just a process about murder. It turned into a public debate about who was to blame for the tragedy of Ukrainian Jews.
Formally, Schwarzbard sat on the defendant’s bench.
But they discussed Petliura.
His power. His army. His responsibility. His ability or inability to stop the violence.
For Ukrainians, it was the murder of a leader in emigration.
For many Jews, an act of retribution.
For Moscow, a convenient political gift.
At this point, Ukrainian and Jewish memory collided head-on.
The main question: was Petliura the organizer of the pogroms?
Here, one cannot write crudely.
The historically honest formula is this: the pogroms happened. Their scale was terrible. But the question of Petliura’s personal role is much more complex than the Soviet formula ‘Petliura is a pogromist’.
There is no convincing picture where Petliura appears as the organizer of a state policy of exterminating Jews. In Ukrainian and some Western historiography, it is emphasized: he did not give orders to organize pogroms, but on the contrary, publicly condemned them and demanded to fight the guilty.
But this is not enough to simply close the topic.
Because a leader is responsible not only for his words. He is also responsible for the power he leads. For the army. For discipline. For whether the state was able to protect those who found themselves vulnerable.
And here history has no convenient answer.
Petliura may not have been the organizer of the pogroms.
But his state could not protect Jewish communities.
These two phrases must stand side by side.
Only then does the conversation become honest.
The UNR and Jews: a paradox that breaks simple schemes
The Ukrainian People’s Republic was not an ‘anti-Semitic’ project. This is an important fact that is often lost in black-and-white debates.
In Ukrainian revolutionary politics, there was the idea of the rights of national minorities. Jews received political representation, national-personal autonomy was discussed, structures related to Jewish affairs were created.
That is, at the level of idea, the UNR tried to build not an ethnically closed state, but a political model where different peoples of the former empire could gain rights.
And here’s the tragedy: on paper, there were rights, but on the ground, there were pogroms.
This is often how a weak state looks at the moment of an empire’s collapse. It proclaims principles but does not control the entire territory. It demands discipline, but parts of the army live by their own logic. It talks about protecting citizens, but on the ground, there are atamans, gangs, reds, whites, local detachments, rumors, fear, and revenge.
This is not an excuse.
This is an explanation of complexity.
For Israel, such a conversation is especially important. Because it allows not to turn Ukrainian history into a primitive formula ‘Ukrainian independence = anti-Semitism’, but also not to erase the Jewish tragedy for the sake of a beautiful national legend.
Jabotinsky: an unexpected bridge between two memories
In this story, there is a figure that is especially important for the Israeli reader — Vladimir Jabotinsky.
One of the key ideologists of Zionism, a person whose legacy still influences the Israeli political tradition, looked at the topic of Petliura more complexly than many expect.
Jabotinsky did not reduce Petliura to the image of a conscious pogromist. He tried to separate personal anti-Semitism from the chaos of events, war, the collapse of power, and mass violence, which often arose not from a single order, but from the collapse of an entire world.
This was not a simple justification.
Jabotinsky perfectly understood Jewish vulnerability. Moreover, the very idea of Jewish self-defense was central to him. He knew: if a people has no strength, its security depends on the mood of others.
And here arises an almost painful parallel.
Petliura told Ukrainians: do not forget the sword.
Jabotinsky told Jews: do not rely only on foreign protection.
Different peoples. Different tragedies. But one conclusion: without their own strength, a people becomes an object of foreign policy.
Soviet propaganda used Jewish pain against Ukraine
The most dangerous thing in this topic is to let Moscow steal both memories at once.
Moscow has used the topic of pogroms for decades to portray the Ukrainian national movement as inherently criminal. For Soviet propaganda, it was convenient: if Ukrainian independence is associated only with anti-Semitism, then the very idea of an independent Ukraine is morally suspect.
But the Kremlin never defended Jewish memory honestly.
The Soviet regime itself destroyed Jewish culture, persecuted Zionism, conducted campaigns against ‘cosmopolitans’, silenced the Jewish specificity of the Holocaust, and used anti-Semitic motifs when it was politically advantageous.
Therefore, the question is not whether there were pogroms. There were.
The question is who and why turned this tragedy into a weapon against Ukrainian statehood.
For Israel, this is fundamental. Because the memory of Jewish victims should not become a tool in the hands of an empire that today itself bombs cities, deports children, erases Ukrainian identity, and justifies war with the language of a ‘historical mission.’
Why Petliura is important right now
Petliura returns to the Ukrainian conversation not because Ukraine is looking for a convenient hero.
Quite the opposite.
Ukraine needs not convenient heroes, but hard lessons.
The first lesson is the army. A state without an army remains a request. Ukraine has already paid too high a price for this in the 20th century and is paying again in the 21st.
The second lesson is allies. Petliura sought external support, made difficult alliances, and went for painful compromises. Modern Ukraine also depends on partners, but already understands: allies help only those who resist themselves.
The third lesson is memory. If a nation does not explain its history itself, the enemy will explain it.
And will explain it in such a way that the nation has no right to a future.
That is why NAnews — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency considers the history of Petliura not as an attempt to replace Jewish pain with a Ukrainian heroic myth, but as a necessity to see the whole picture: the Ukrainian struggle for statehood, the tragedy of Jewish communities, Soviet manipulation of memory, and today’s war of Russia against Ukraine.
Ukraine of 2026 is not the UNR of 1919
There is another important point that should be understood in Israel.
Modern Ukraine is not the Ukraine of the civil war times.
This is a state where the Jew Volodymyr Zelensky became president in democratic elections. This is a country where Jewish communities are part of society, the army, volunteering, business, culture, and diplomacy. This is a country where the memory of Babyn Yar, the Holocaust, Ukrainian-Jewish relations, and Russian aggression has become part of a complex but real public conversation.
Therefore, the Russian attempt to portray Ukraine again through old anti-Semitic stereotypes looks especially cynical.
Putin’s Russia destroys Ukrainian cities, kills civilians, attacks energy infrastructure, takes away children, destroys museums, schools, hospitals, and residential areas.
And then tells the world that it is waging an ‘anti-fascist’ war.
For Israel, this should sound familiar and alarming. When the aggressor hides behind the memory of victims, one should look not at his slogans, but at his actions.
Petliura between the Ukrainian sword and Jewish pain
Petliura remains a complex figure. And perhaps that is why he is so important.
He cannot be turned into a spotless icon. He cannot.
But he cannot be left only in the Soviet caricature, where the entire Ukrainian struggle for independence is reduced to one accusation.
The history of Petliura requires two honesties at once.
Honesty before Jewish pain.
And honesty before the Ukrainian struggle for freedom.
For Ukraine, he is important as a person who understood the value of the army, independence, and breaking with Moscow. For Israel, as a figure through which one can talk about pogroms, Schwarzbard, political responsibility, Soviet propaganda, and the complex memory of two peoples.
This is not an easy conversation.
But it is precisely such conversations that are needed during the war when Russia again tries to steal the past to justify the present.
The phrase ‘Do not forget the sword’ today sounds not as a call to violence. It sounds like a lesson to peoples who know the price of helplessness.
Freedom needs strength.
Memory needs honesty.
And the history of Ukraine and Israel requires not convenient myths, but the ability to see tragedy and struggle simultaneously.