With a Ukrainian military honor guard standing ramrod straight beside his coffin, Andriy Melnyk, a leader of a Ukrainian nationalist movement who died six decades ago \u2014 and who has been no less divisive after death than in life \u2014 lay in state in Kyiv before his reburial on Sunday.<\/p>\n
President Volodymyr Zelensky provided full state honors for the ritual, signaling a deep shift in Ukrainian politics after Russia\u2019s invasion in 2022. Before then, Mr. Zelensky had kept nationalist politics at arm\u2019s length; in the reburial, he embraced them.<\/p>\n
The remains of the long-dead World War II-era Ukrainian leader were exhumed in Luxembourg, where he had been buried after dying in exile in 1964, and returned to Ukraine. There was none of the raw grief of today\u2019s war funerals.<\/p>\n
Melnyk led one of two factions of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, including through a period of alignment with the Nazi army during its occupation of Ukraine, which was one of the bloodiest chapters of World War II.<\/p>\n
The Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Germany in 1939 and was caught by surprise two years later when the Nazis invaded Ukraine, then Soviet territory. Ukrainians had suffered greatly under Soviet rule, and many initially saw the Nazis as liberators.<\/p>\n
Factions from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its insurgent army fought alongside the Nazis in what they viewed as a struggle for Ukrainian sovereignty. Members of those groups also took part in atrocities against Jewish and Polish civilians. Later in the war, some of the groups fought against the Nazis.<\/p>\n
As he was under arrest in Germany through most of the war, Melnyk\u2019s degree of culpability in the Holocaust and a murderous fight with ethnic Poles in western Ukraine in 1945<\/a> has divided historians ever since.<\/p>\n His body lay in state in the towering Greek Catholic cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ in Kyiv before being transferred to a final resting place in a new military cemetery outside the city.<\/p>\n Before Russia\u2019s all-out invasion the ceremony would have been a risky move by any Ukrainian politician who wanted to win votes from Russian speakers. But during the war, Ukrainians have embraced more tightly all symbols of Ukrainian independence, and Mr. Zelensky moved with them.<\/p>\n The president had campaigned in 2019 on a promise of negotiating a peace agreement with Russia, and had studiously avoided the memory politics of World War II. He declined to state his personal views of midcentury Ukrainian independence leaders like Melnyk.<\/p>\n