By Topwar
Ukrainian state
On June 30, 1941, German troops occupied Lvov. On the same day in the evening, on behalf of the hastily assembled Legislative Assembly, Bandera’s closest associate Yaroslav Stetsko proclaimed the “Act of the Proclamation of the Ukrainian State.” A new Ukrainian state was created “on the mother Ukrainian lands.” The leadership of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) hoped that the Ukrainian state would receive the same status as Tiso’s Slovakia or Pavelic’s Croatia, and together with the Third Reich would “establish a new order around the world.” The Bandera leadership was supported by the well-known ideologist of Ukrainianism, Metropolitan of Galicia Andrey Shcheptytsky.
OUN members in a number of district and regional centers of western Ukraine began to form government bodies and the police. On July 3, Stetsko sent letters of welcome to Hitler, Mussolini, Horthy, Mannerheim and other leaders of the new Europe. The Germans were stunned by such a quickness of their mercenaries, but quickly came to their senses and dispersed the self-proclaimed government. The Nazi leadership was not going to create an “independent Ukraine”, Berlin planned to make the Ukrainian SSR part of the “eternal Reich”…
