Why Putin “convicted” Bandera again: a fake court, a court historian, and a new “denazification of Ukraine”

The Russian aggressor state, after more than four years of full-scale war, has not been able to destroy Ukrainian statehood and force the Ukrainian people to abandon resistance. Therefore, for the domestic audience, the Kremlin once again resorted to the familiar Soviet cliché: if Ukraine resists Russia, then it is not the struggle of an independent country against an invader, but supposedly the continuation of ‘Bandera Nazism.’

Now a judicial seal has been added to television propaganda.

On August 4, 2026, the Tverskoy District Court of Moscow satisfied the application of the General Prosecutor’s Office of Russia. Stepan Bandera, his brother Vasyl, Roman Shukhevych, Andriy Melnyk, six other figures of the Ukrainian national movement, as well as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army were declared

“accomplices of Nazi Germany in war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Great Patriotic War against the Soviet people.”

“The court’s decision is necessary to perpetuate the memory of the victims of the genocide of the Soviet people, to debunk the illegal actions of the regime in Kyiv, to annul decisions on the rehabilitation of war criminals, and to prevent acts of extremism against our country.”

“Given the above, the court fully satisfied the claims of the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office and recognized them as accomplices of Nazi Germany in war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

This was not an ordinary criminal case. All the named individuals have long been deceased, and no punishment was assigned to anyone. The Prosecutor General’s Office requested to establish a ‘fact of legal significance,’ and the court agreed with the ‘historical-legal construction’ prepared by Russian state bodies.

The practical result of the process is clear: previously, Russian propaganda claimed that Bandera, the OUN, and the UPA were Nazis. Now it can add: ‘This was established by the court.’

But it was not only long-deceased people who were ‘judged’ here.

Russian historian Mikhail Myagkov, involved in the case as an expert, directly stated that the current Ukrainian authorities, the SBU, the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine, and Ukrainian military units are ‘factual and legal heirs’ of the OUN and UPA. He claimed that Russia is today fighting with the direct heirs of the Banderites.

Thus, the modern political goal of the court was not even hidden. Formally, its decision is dedicated to the events of the 1940s. In reality, it is intended to justify today’s Russian aggression against Ukraine.

What exactly happened in the Tverskoy court

The General Prosecutor’s Office of Russia asked the Tverskoy District Court of Moscow to officially recognize ten figures of the Ukrainian national movement as ‘accomplices of Nazi Germany’: Stepan and Vasyl Bandera, Roman Shukhevych, Andriy Melnyk, Mykola Arsenych, Taras Borovets, Dmytro Klyachkivsky, Mykola Kozak, Myron Matviyko, and Yaroslav Stetsko.

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) were also included in the same accusatory construction.

The Russian side stated that the listed individuals and organizations were involved in ‘terror against the population of occupied territories,’ ‘punitive operations, mass executions, fighting against the Red Army, and the destruction of Soviet partisans.’ All these actions were combined by the Prosecutor General’s Office under the general formulation of crimes against the ‘Soviet people’.

As the main episodes, the Russian authorities named the ‘Lviv pogrom, the destruction of Belarusian Khatyn, and the mass killings of the Polish population in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.’ In some Russian publications, Babi Yar was also added to this list, although responsibility for this crime has a different organizational and historical structure.

Regarding Lviv, the Russian version claims that mass killings took place under the command of Roman Shukhevych, and the total number of dead Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, and Poles exceeded eight thousand.

The destruction of Khatyn is linked by the Russian side to the 118th auxiliary police battalion, which in public materials is presented as a formation consisting of members of the OUN and UPA.

In Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, the OUN and UPA are attributed with the killing of at least 120 thousand Poles. At the same time, Russian publications do not explain in detail by what methodology this exact figure was obtained, which territories and periods were included in the calculation.

But the most important political element of the accusation was not the description of the events of the 1940s. Mikhail Myagkov and the Russian Military-Historical Society transferred the responsibility of historical organizations to modern Ukraine, calling Ukrainian state, intelligence, and military structures direct heirs of the ‘Banderites.’

Thus, the Russian construction includes several levels at once. First, real crimes and confirmed cases of cooperation of individual Ukrainian nationalists with Nazi structures are listed. Then different organizations, units, and periods are combined into one system. After that, the responsibility of people from the 1940s is transferred to the Ukrainian state of the 21st century.

This version cannot simply be declared completely fabricated. The Lviv pogrom, the participation of local auxiliary police in the persecution of Jews, the crimes of Ukrainian collaborators in Belarus, and the mass killings of Polish civilians in Volhynia did indeed take place.

But in the Moscow presentation, reliable facts are combined with unproven personal accusations, controversial figures, incorrect identification of the OUN, UPA, auxiliary police, and German security units, as well as with direct political propaganda against modern Ukraine.

It is this mixed construction — part of which is based on real crimes, and part on generalizations and political conclusions — that the Tverskoy court formalized as a legally significant fact.

What documents were presented to the court

The Russian side reported that it used documents from archives:

• FSB of Russia;
• Ministry of Defense of Russia;
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia;
• State Archive of the Russian Federation;
• archives and courts of Belarus.

Written explanations were prepared by Mikhail Myagkov.

However, in the published RVIO retelling, there are no archival codes, a complete list of investigated cases, copies of documents, or an explanation of which specific source confirms each individual conclusion. There is also no full motivated court act with an analysis of the reliability of the evidence.

This is fundamentally important because the expression ‘document from the FSB archive’ in itself proves nothing.

In the former archives of the NKVD and KGB, the following may be stored:

• authentic documents of the OUN and UPA captured by Soviet authorities;
• German orders and reports;
• leaflets and internal reports of the underground;
• agent reports;
• interrogation protocols obtained under pressure;
• materials of Soviet show trials;
• propaganda notes compiled for a predetermined conclusion.

A document stored in the KGB archive is not necessarily created by the KGB. But a paper with an archival number does not automatically become reliable.

It is necessary to know who, when, and under what circumstances compiled the document, whether the original has been preserved, and whether it is confirmed by independent German, Polish, Ukrainian, Jewish, or Western sources.

The Moscow process did not provide the public with the opportunity to conduct such a check.

Mikhail Myagkov: a historian who has already chosen a side

Mikhail Myagkov has a professional historical education, a doctoral degree, and academic positions. Therefore, it would be incorrect to claim that he is a historian only by name.

But he cannot be presented as an independent expert in a case directly related to justifying Putin’s policies.

Myagkov was an official trustee of Putin in the 2024 presidential elections. His name is present in the list published by the Central Election Commission.

He holds the position of scientific director of the Russian Military-Historical Society — a state ideological structure involved in the preparation of textbooks, methodological materials, and programs of so-called patriotic education.

In February 2025, Myagkov participated in the presentation of a manual on the history of the ‘Ukrainian question.’ The authors openly stated that they relied primarily on Putin’s statements. Myagkov called Ukrainians and Russians ‘two parts of a single people,’ claimed that Ukraine was artificially separated from Russia, and expressed hope for the dissemination of materials in territories he called occupied by the ‘Kyiv neo-Nazi regime.’

As early as 2023, he claimed that Ukrainian society was supposedly brought up in such a way that it was ready to ‘exterminate’ Russians, and compared modern Western technology to German ‘Tigers’ and ‘Panthers’ of World War II.

In the Tverskoy court, Myagkov continued the same line. He did not limit himself to analyzing documents from 1941–1944, but immediately transferred the accusation to modern Ukraine.

Therefore, the problem is not that Myagkov does not have a diploma. The problem is that his politically biased conclusion is presented as a neutral historical expertise.

It turns out to be a closed system:

1. Russian security agencies select archival materials;
2. The Prosecutor General’s Office formulates the required conclusion;
3. Putin’s trustee gives the conclusion an academic appearance;
4. the Russian court declares it a legally significant fact;
5. state propaganda transfers the decision to modern Ukraine.

The main substitution: crimes against which ‘Soviet people’

The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office and RVIO constantly use the formula ‘crimes against the Soviet people.’

Formally, by 1941, the residents of Lviv and Volhynia indeed found themselves under Soviet rule. But the Russian formulation deliberately hides how exactly these territories became Soviet.

Until September 1939, Lviv was part of Poland. On September 17, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east — sixteen days after Nazi Germany attacked it. The division of Polish territory between the two totalitarian states was provided for by the secret agreements of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Soviet troops occupied Lviv on September 22, 1939.

During the next twenty-one months, Soviet authorities conducted arrests, deportations, and executions in Lviv. Before retreating in the summer of 1941, the NKVD killed two to three thousand prisoners in local prisons — mostly Ukrainians suspected of ties to the nationalist underground.

Thus, the residents of Lviv became ‘Soviet citizens’ after military occupation and annexation, not as a result of free political choice.

A similar situation developed in Volhynia. Before the Soviet invasion, it was the territory of the Second Polish Republic. The main victims of the mass killings of 1943–1945 were Polish civilians, many of whom were citizens of pre-war Poland. The Polish Institute of National Remembrance directly calls these lands the eastern territories of pre-war Poland.

The Russian formula turns the murdered Poles of Volhynia into an impersonal part of the ‘Soviet people,’ although it was the USSR in 1939 that participated in the destruction of Polish statehood in these territories.

Khatyn was located in the Minsk region of the Belarusian SSR — on the territory of present-day Belarus. Its victims were residents of a Belarusian village destroyed during a joint punitive operation by the Dirlewanger German unit and the 118th auxiliary police battalion.

Today, Russia builds such a scheme:

• Lviv was Soviet — so its victims belong to Russian memory;
• Volhynia was Soviet — so Polish victims can be called ‘Soviet people’;
• Khatyn was in the USSR — so Russia can use Belarusian victims in its own accusatory process;
• modern Russia declares itself the sole heir of the USSR and gains the right to speak on behalf of all the dead.

But the Soviet Union is not equal to modern Russia.

Belarusians, Ukrainians, Jews, and Poles do not become Russians just because during the war Moscow called them ‘Soviet citizens.’ The memory of the Jews of Lviv, the Poles of Volhynia, and the Belarusians of Khatyn is not Putin’s property.

Especially cynical is the dissolution of Jewish victims in the general Soviet category. Even at Babi Yar, the Soviet monument installed in 1976 spoke of about one hundred thousand dead citizens but did not indicate that the main execution on September 29–30, 1941, was the targeted extermination of Jews.

Russia inherits not only the Soviet victory mythology but also the Soviet habit of erasing the nationality of victims when it interferes with a convenient state narrative.

What is really known about the Lviv pogrom

The Lviv pogrom was a real crime. Denying it or the participation of Ukrainian nationalists in it is impossible.

After the entry of German troops on June 30, 1941, the German occupiers and OUN-B activists began inciting anti-Semitic violence. The pogrom involved German soldiers, the newly created Ukrainian militia, Ukrainian nationalist activists, as well as some local Ukrainian and Polish residents.

Jews were beaten, robbed, humiliated, raped, and killed. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates the number of victims of the pogrom itself at a minimum of several hundred and possibly several thousand people. The most frequently cited figure of four thousand is now considered exaggerated, as it may include Jews shot by German units later in July.

The Russian side claimed more than eight thousand dead ‘Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, and Poles’ from June to August and attributed the mass killings to the command of Shukhevych.

But the public Russian retelling does not show a document that would prove that Shukhevych gave the order for the pogrom or directly commanded its execution.

This does not exonerate Shukhevych and does not remove questions about his service in formations associated with Nazi Germany. But a personal accusation of leading a mass murder requires a specific chain of evidence: an order, a report, a testimony of a direct participant, or documented subordination.

The formulas ‘nationalists participated in the pogrom’ and ‘Shukhevych personally commanded the pogrom’ are not the same.

Babi Yar: UPA could not have been there

In some Russian publications about the Moscow decision, Babi Yar was named among the proven episodes.

On September 29–30, 1941, 33,771 Jews were killed there. The organizers and main executors of the mass shooting were Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C, SS units, and German police with the participation of auxiliary forces.

The role of specific local policemen and collaborators should be investigated separately.

But declaring Babi Yar a crime of the UPA is impossible at least chronologically: the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in its main organizational form emerged later.

The Russian substitution is constructed as follows:

• among the auxiliary forces were residents of Ukraine;
• some Ukrainian policemen may have been connected to the nationalist movement;
• therefore, the crime is declared a crime of the OUN and UPA;
• then responsibility is transferred to the entire Ukrainian independence movement.

Thus, specific perpetrators disappear, and instead, a convenient propaganda collective image of the ‘Banderite’ emerges.

Khatyn: the Ukrainian battalion was not a UPA unit

On March 22, 1943, Belarusian Khatyn was destroyed during a joint operation of the 118th auxiliary police battalion and the SS special unit Dirlewanger.

Historian Per Anders Rudling established that the 118th battalion was a collaborationist formation within the German police system. A significant part of its composition consisted of Ukrainians, including people with a nationalist past. The participation of the battalion in the destruction of Khatyn is confirmed by research.

Therefore, it is impossible to deny the participation of Ukrainian collaborators in the crime.

But the Russian message takes the next step: it calls the battalion a unit consisting of members of the OUN and UPA.

This misleads the reader.

The 118th battalion was part of the German auxiliary police, not a military unit of the UPA. Even if some of its members were previously part of the OUN or later joined the nationalist underground, this does not turn the entire battalion into a UPA structure.

It is necessary to distinguish:

• German command;
• auxiliary police;
• nationality of the personnel;
• previous political affiliation of individuals;
• their subsequent fate;
• specific participation in the crime.

The Moscow trial replaced this complex work with a single general label.

Volhynia: a crime that cannot be denied

The most serious grounds for the Russian accusation relate to the mass killings of Polish civilians in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.

The Polish Institute of National Remembrance qualifies the actions of the OUN-B and UPA as genocide and estimates the total number of Polish victims at about one hundred thousand people. On July 11, 1943, UPA units carried out coordinated attacks on almost one hundred Polish settlements.

The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office named a figure of at least 120 thousand dead, but did not explain the counting methodology and territorial boundaries in the public message.

The Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance acknowledges that the main victims of the tragedy on both sides were unarmed civilians. It also emphasizes: people who participated in the killings of civilians cannot be unconditionally heroized. At the same time, the Ukrainian side reminds of the retaliatory killings of Ukrainians by Polish armed formations.

The historical context — pre-war Polish policy, German occupation, Soviet terror, and retaliatory crimes — is necessary to understand the reasons.

But no context justifies the mass killings of women, children, and other civilians.

That is why exposing Russian propaganda should not turn into Ukrainian glossing over history.

Did the KGB fabricate all the evidence

No.

The Soviet special services did indeed fabricate cases, extract confessions, conduct propaganda campaigns against Ukrainian emigration, and tried to present any independence movement as a Nazi conspiracy.

Therefore, Soviet interrogation protocols require critical verification.

But modern studies of the crimes of the OUN, auxiliary police, and individual UPA units are based not only on NKVD and KGB materials.

Historians use:

• German reports of Einsatzgruppen, SS, and police;
• documents of the occupation administration;
• materials captured by Western allies;
• German photographs and newsreels;
• documents of the Polish underground;
• testimonies of Jews recorded outside the USSR;
• Yad Vashem archives;
• documents of the OUN and UPA themselves;
• diaries, letters, and memoirs;
• materials of American, German, Polish, and other court processes;
• databases of victims and results of exhumations.

The newsreel of the Lviv pogrom was filmed by the Germans and then presented by the allies at the Nuremberg trial. The original materials are stored in American archives and Yad Vashem. The KGB could not fabricate them.

Yad Vashem, in its own reference on the OUN, points to cooperation with Germany, participation of organization members in German battalions, the formation of Ukrainian administration and police, as well as subsequent German repressions against the leadership of the proclaimed Ukrainian state.

American studies also conclude the participation of OUN members and UPA units in the destruction of Jews in Western Ukraine.

At the same time, modern researchers expose Soviet exaggerations. For example, they do not confirm the Russian thesis that almost the entire Ukrainian auxiliary police consisted of OUN members. The composition of the police was much more complex and included people of different nationalities, biographies, and political beliefs.

Therefore, both extremes are incorrect:

“The KGB proved everything” — false.

“All the crimes of the OUN and UPA were invented by the KGB” — also false.

What the Nuremberg trial decided

The Nuremberg Tribunal did not recognize the OUN or UPA as criminal organizations.

The indictment included the leadership corps of the Nazi party, Gestapo, SD, SS, SA, Reich government, General Staff, and High Command of the German armed forces. The OUN and UPA were not included in this list.

Bandera, Melnyk, and Shukhevych were also not defendants of the International Military Tribunal.

Therefore, Nuremberg did not condemn them.

But it also did not acquit them: the question of their personal criminal responsibility was simply not considered.

On February 11, 1946, the Soviet prosecution presented the testimony of former Abwehr officer Erwin Stolze. He claimed to have contacted Bandera and Melnyk and gave them instructions to organize anti-Soviet subversive activities after Germany’s attack on the USSR.

This is important evidence of cooperation with German military intelligence.

However, accepting the document as evidence of Abwehr activity is not a verdict on Bandera, Melnyk, or the OUN.

The correct formulation looks like this:

• Nuremberg received evidence of Bandera and Melnyk’s contacts with the Abwehr;
• Bandera and Melnyk were not defendants;
• The OUN and UPA were not considered as organizations that the tribunal should recognize as criminal;
• there was no separate decision on their guilt or innocence.

The Moscow court of 2026 did not repeat Nuremberg’s decision. It created a new internal Russian act for a modern political purpose.

Why Putin needed this now

The Russian propaganda construct works because it starts with real facts.

Some Ukrainian nationalists collaborated with Germany.

Some OUN activists participated in anti-Semitic violence.

Ukrainian collaborators served in the auxiliary police.

UPA units committed mass killings of Polish civilians.

But then substitutions begin.

Different factions of the OUN, UPA, Taras Borovets’ formations, German auxiliary police, and individual guard battalions are declared a single organization.

Different crimes — Lviv, Babi Yar, Khatyn, and Volhynia — are combined into one accusatory package.

The responsibility of specific individuals is transferred to the entire Ukrainian independence movement.

Then it is transferred to modern Ukraine.

A simple scheme emerges for the Russian domestic audience:

1. The OUN collaborated with Germany.
2. Ukraine honors some figures of the national movement.
3. Therefore, modern Ukraine is a Nazi state.
4. Consequently, the Russian invasion is supposedly a new fight against Hitler.

The last conclusion is a lie.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum stated back in February 2022 that Putin distorts and appropriates Holocaust history, falsely claiming that democratic Ukraine needs ‘denazification’.

The Moscow court added legal decoration to this propaganda.

This is especially needed by the Kremlin now, when the promised quick victory did not happen, Ukraine continues to resist, and the Russian audience needs to be explained again why the war is dragging on and why the aggressor cannot subdue the Ukrainian people.

Instead of acknowledging the failure, the Kremlin again offers the usual answer: the ‘Nazis’, ‘Banderites’, and the West are to blame.

What Ukraine must acknowledge

Russia has no right to use the crimes of the 1940s to justify modern aggression.

But Ukraine should also not respond to Russian propaganda with unconditional heroization of all OUN and UPA figures.

The struggle for independence is not an automatic indulgence.

A person could oppose Soviet totalitarianism and at the same time:

• hold anti-Semitic views;
• collaborate with Germany;
• participate in criminal structures;
• bear political or command responsibility for the killings of civilians.

An honest Ukrainian memory policy should include opening archives, continuing exhumations, publishing the names of victims, cooperating with Polish and Israeli researchers, and rejecting sterile biographies of historical heroes.

Such an approach does not weaken Ukraine.

It demonstrates the difference between a democratic society capable of discussing its own crimes and Putin’s Russia, where the court, prosecutor’s office, and state historian jointly produce the only permitted version of the past.

Israel should not choose between two myths

For the Israeli audience, this story has special significance.

Israel has the right to demand from Ukraine an honest conversation about the anti-Semitism of the OUN, the participation of nationalists in the auxiliary police, and the killings of Jews.

People and organizations with such a past cannot be turned into impeccable heroes without explaining the price paid by Jewish and Polish civilians for their activities.

But Israel should also not allow Russia to privatize the memory of the Holocaust.

Putin uses Jewish victims not to protect Jews, but to justify the war against Ukraine. The Russian state first dissolves the Jews of Lviv and Babi Yar into the category of the ‘Soviet people’, then declares itself the owner of their memory, and then uses this memory as an accusation against Ukrainians of the 21st century.

A consistent Israeli position should include four points:

• crimes against Jews must be named regardless of the nationality of the perpetrators;
• criminals cannot be unconditionally heroized;
• modern Ukraine is not a Nazi state;
• the memory of the Holocaust cannot serve as justification for Russian aggression.

NANews — News of Israel considers the Moscow process precisely from this point of view: acknowledging the crimes of Ukrainian nationalists does not mean recognizing the Kremlin’s version of history.

The memory of the Jews of Lviv, the Poles of Volhynia, and the Belarusians of Khatyn does not belong to Russia.

Putin condemned Bandera again, but the verdict is intended for Ukraine.

Stepan Bandera was killed by an agent of the Soviet special services in Munich in 1959. 67 years later, a Russian court issued him another symbolic verdict.

But Bandera can no longer respond to the accusations. The OUN and UPA in their historical form of the 1940s have long ceased to exist.

There exists a modern Ukraine, which Russia is trying to destroy and subjugate.

That is why Mikhail Myagkov in court spoke not only about the past. He directly called the current Ukrainian authorities and military structures the ‘legal successors’ of the Banderites and stated that Russia is fighting precisely against them today.

With this phrase, he revealed the meaning of the entire process.

The Russian authorities needed not only archives, not only Bandera, and not only the memory of the victims. They required judicial confirmation of the main propaganda thesis of the war: Ukraine is allegedly a continuation of the Nazi movement, and Russia is the liberator.

But the crimes of people from the 1940s are not inherited by an entire nation.

They do not turn a democratic state of the 21st century into the Third Reich.

They do not give Russia the right to attack, occupy territories, destroy cities, and kill Ukrainians.

Putin ‘condemned’ Bandera again because it is increasingly difficult for the Russian aggressor state to explain to its own audience why the heroic resistance of the Ukrainian people could not be broken.

The Moscow court did not restore historical justice.

It took real crimes, mixed them with unproven accusations, appropriated the memory of other peoples for Russia, and turned the deceased Jews, Poles, and Belarusians into tools of today’s Russian war.

How the material was prepared

The NANews editorial team compared the public statement of the Russian Military Historical Society about the process with materials from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem, documents of the Nuremberg Trials, publications of the Ukrainian and Polish Institutes of National Memory, and academic studies of the destruction of Khatyn.

The editorial team did not receive its own copies of the materials presented by the Prosecutor General’s Office to the Tver Court and does not claim that every document in the case was falsified. The main complaint of the article relates to the absence of verifiable connections between individual documents and the broad political conclusions of the court in the public Russian retelling.

The original editorial value of the material lies in comparing specific Russian accusations with independent sources, analyzing the appropriation of the concept of the ‘Soviet people,’ and explaining why this process is important for the Israeli-Ukrainian audience.