It is not often that a corpse, long dead and buried, gets a round of attention on the news. This particular body, buried a long time ago, was exhumed and given a solemn reburial, this time with full military honours. The purpose? To revive the staggering, enfeebled corpse of Ukrainian ultranationalist sentiment.

What am I talking about? A ferocious dispute has erupted between Warsaw and Kyiv. Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky, earlier in the year, presided over the reburial ceremony of Andriy Melnyk, the commander of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists – Melnyk (OUN-M). The latter was an ultranationalist, anti-Soviet organisation, steeped in the ideology of fascism and racial exclusivity.

Melnyk’s remains, buried for all these years in Luxembourg, were buried with full military honours in Ukraine. His group was one faction of the OUN, the other being led by Ukrainian ultranationalist leader Stepan Bandera.

The two organisations, while hostile to each other, were nevertheless motivated by the racist ideology of ultranationalist exclusivity. Intending to create an ethnically pure, Greater Ukraine, both groups collaborated with Nazi Germany. The OUN-Melnyk carried out massacres of Jews, Soviet partisans, and Polish communities in the areas they controlled.

There were striking similarities between the far right ideology of the Nazi regime and the OUN. Steeped in antisemitic rhetoric and conspiracy theories, OUN desired not just an anticommunist Ukraine free of Soviet control, but an ethnically cleansed nation. Jews and Muscovites (the latter a term used to denote Russians) were the existential enemies of Ukraine, according to the OUN.

Polish communities were also denounced in extremist terms – sea of blood, extermination, annihilation were just some of the concepts deployed in the OUN’s foundational documents to describe the unwanted presence of Poles.

The OUN, led by Melnyk, advised cooperation with Nazi Germany. They certainly did – helping to massacre Jews, Polish, Roma, Russians and other peoples they deemed inimical to the creation of a racially pure Ukraine.

The irony of this episode of WW2 is that an independent Ukraine was regarded with barely concealed derision by the Nazi government. The latter wanted recruits, ideologically fanatical, to assist them with the daily business of running an empire. Melnyk himself was at one point arrested by the Gestapo for insisting on the formation of an independent Ukraine. How such a Ukrainian state would survive without the aid of Nazi guns and bullets, he did not specify.

Nazi Germany, and its Eastern European proxies, were comprehensively defeated by 1945. Melnyk, along with his fellow perpetrators, escaped to the West. He lived to a ripe old age in West Germany.

The killers who beat and hacked Jews to death in WW2 were rebranded as patriotic freedom fighters by the United States and Britain. The political expediencies of the Cold War superseded any considerations for prosecuting Holocaust perpetrators.

The Polish government has strongly condemned Kyiv’s decision to rebury Melnyk with full military honours. The Zelensky government has allowed the naming of a special forces unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the military wing of the OUN. Knowing full well the horrific history of OUN fighters massacring Poles, Warsaw has demanded the return of national honours it bestowed upon Zelensky.

Indeed, Warsaw has long campaigned for Kyiv to accept the OUN’s mass murder of Polish people in Volhynia, a region in Eastern Europe, as genocide. Kyiv has rejected this claim, and Warsaw has vetoed Kyiv’s moves to join the European Union. Up to 100 000 Polish civilians were killed by the UPA during WW2.

Zelensky honouring WW2-era Ukrainian ultranationalists is not a harmless exercise in respecting historical truth. It is a calculated step to revive the fanatical ethnocentric nationalism of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators. Such a move was bound to revive competing nationalist resentments and a clash of victimhoods.

While Warsaw and Kyiv are staunch allies in the fight against Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, this alliance has ruptured somewhat by the rival resentments being stoked by both parties.

The significant and important similarities between the fascistic ideology of OUN members and the Nazi regime cannot be dismissed or overlooked. European parties with similar ultranationalist and ethnic-cleansing ideologies cooperated in wartime.

The OUN specifically adopted the outlook of eugenics in its foundational principles. Seeking to remove what they deemed undesirables’ from the Ukrainian territories, the ideology of the OUN resembled German fascism in its zeal to create a population of racially pure, healthy stock.

The political zombies who attended Melnyk’s reburial are doing their utmost to recruit Ukrainians to the failed crusade of ultranationalism. The cult of Melnyk-Bandera Ukrainian ultranationalism may very well be expedient for the Zelensky government, but he has invited a ferocious counter-action from his Polish allies.

The OUN brand of ultranationalism has long been utilised by the policymakers in Washington and London as a proxy force. While the generations of WW2 and the Cold War have passed, new recruits need to be found to continue Kyiv’s ultranationalist agenda going. New generations are required to replenish the ranks of the Ukrainian military.

Exhuming and reburying Melnyk is not only about the past, important as that it is. It also serves to revive the doctrines of the far right.