Dear friends!
The hard times that Ukraine is living through nowadays require responsibility and carefully weighed decisions from each of its citizens, and even more so from the state, political and public organizations.
Public authorities in their speeches constantly emphasize that certain external forces are attempting to divert Ukraine from the path of democracy it is taking to the united Europe. We are also of the same opinion. At the same time, we believe that there are currently also internal forces in Ukraine that are trying to take the country back to the totalitarian times. In our opinion, such an attempt is the decision of the Lviv regional council to announce 2019 as the year of Stepan Bandera.
“Our power should be horrible,” the OUN leader said in his appeals to the associates. And the Volhynia massacre in 1943 only confirms that this would have been the ruling of Bandera, if his Ukrainian insurgent army (UPA) managed to seize power all over Ukraine. That is why we are greatly concerned by the mentioned decision of the Lviv regional council, as well as by the resolution of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on providing the war veterans status to the UPA soldiers.
We are against extremism and xenophobia. We are for a democratic European country – Ukraine, in which all the ethnic groups that make up its political nation are to live in peace, harmony and prosperity.
Jewish Confederation of Ukraine