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The repatriated remains of 20th-century Ukrainian military leader Andrii Melnyk and his wife Sofiia Fedak-Melnyk were reburied at the National Military Memorial Cemetery near Kyiv on Monday.
The ceremony was attended by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian officials.
The ashes of the key leader of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and his spouse were exhumed last week in Luxembourg and then transported to Ukraine.
“Today we all see that the Ukrainian idea can overcome what once seemed absolutely insurmountable,” Zelenskyy said at the ceremony on Monday.
“Now, when we are on Ukrainian soil, under our Ukrainian flag, to the sound of the Ukrainian national anthem, paying due tribute to our Ukrainian heroes, we feel in our hearts everything that Ukrainians were forced to go through, everything our people had to endure.”
Divisive figure
Born in 1890, Melnyk was a colonel in the Army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and a close brother-in-arms of Yevhen Konovalets, a military commander and political leader of OUN.
After Konovalets was assassinated in 1938 by the Soviet secret police NKVD, the OUN split into two factions: the OUN-M led by Melnyk, and the more radical OUN-B, led by Stepan Bandera.
To this day both factions remain the subject of considerable controversy due to their wartime activities, including collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II, driven by an opposition to Soviet rule.
However, Nazi Germany rejected the prospect of an independent Ukrainian state and soon turned against Melnyk and other Ukrainian leaders.
Melnyk was initially put under house arrest before being deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
He died in Germany in 1964 and was then laid to rest in Luxembourg.
“As we were bringing Colonel Andrii Melnyk and his wife Sofiia back to Ukraine — through Zakarpattia and then across half the country to our free capital, Kyiv — this path was not marked by the discord that had so often knocked us, and Ukraine, off our feet in the past,” Zelenskyy said on X.
“There were no doubts about who Ukraine’s true enemy is, and who its friends, partners, and brothers are.”
The burial ceremony on Monday took place at the National Military Memorial in the Kyiv region, an Arlington-style cemetery opened last year for soldiers killed in Russia’s invasions of Ukraine.