The repatriated remains of 20th-century Ukrainian military leader Andrii Melnyk and his wife Sofiia Fedak-Melnyk were reburied on Monday at the National Military Memorial Cemetery near Kyiv.
President Volodymyr Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials attended the ceremony.
The ashes of this key leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and his wife were exhumed last week in Luxembourg, then transferred to Ukraine.
« Today we all see that the Ukrainian idea can overcome what once seemed absolutely insurmountable Â,” Zelensky said at the ceremony Monday.
« Now that we are on Ukrainian soil, under our Ukrainian flag, to the sound of the Ukrainian national anthem, paying a fitting tribute to our Ukrainian heroes, we feel deep within us everything that Ukrainians were forced to go through, everything that our people had to endure. »
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Born in 1890, Melnyk was a colonel in the army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and a close comrade-in-arms of Yevhen Konovaletsmilitary commander and political leader of the OUN, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.
After the assassination of Konovalets in 1938 by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, the UN split into two factions: the UN-M, led by Melnyk, and the more radical UN-B, led by Stepan Bandera.
Even today, the two factions remain at the heart of heated controversies due to their activities during the war, notably their collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II, motivated by their opposition to Soviet power.
But Nazi Germany rejected the prospect of an independent Ukrainian state and quickly turned against Melnyk and other Ukrainian leaders.
Melnyk was first placed in supervised residence before being deported to the concentration camp ofOranienbourg-Sachsenhausen Situé près de Berlin.
He died in Germany in 1964 and was later buried in Luxembourg.
« As we brought Colonel Andrii Melnyk and his wife Sofiia back to Ukraine, through Transcarpathia and then across half the country to our free capital, Kyiv, this path was not marked by the divisions that in the past had so often tripped us and Ukraine Â,” Zelensky said on X.
« No one then doubted the identity of Ukraine’s real enemy, nor those who were its allies, partners and brothers.. »
Monday’s burial ceremony was held at the National Military Memorial in the Kyiv region, a cemetery modeled on Washington’s Arlington, opened last year for soldiers killed during Russia’s invasions of Ukraine.
