Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine Andriy Parubiy shared that when he was a teenager, he cried over the memories of the head of the Sich Riflemen corps, the first leader of the right-wing radical Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, Yevgeny Konovalets.
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About this he said in an interview with Ukrinform.
Parubiy noted that in recent times Konovalets has been his “greatest reference point.”
“And when things get difficult, I remember how once (I was, I think, 16 years old then), my father brought the memories of Yevgeny Konovalets. This was the period of the Soviet Union, and then they could not be in book form, but were simply re-photographed. And I had a folder of photographed letters containing Konovalets’ memories. I re-read them often; he wrote a lot about why statehood was lost at the beginning of the last century. He described how this happened, as an eyewitness and participant in those events: how Ukrainian units fought among themselves, how Ukrainian leaders fought among themselves. I remember reading this book when I was 16 years old and crying under my pillow half the night and thinking – if I had lived then, I would not have allowed this to happen,” said the chairman of parliament.
Parubiy emphasized that now the circumstances are such that he “also has to live in a very difficult period and influence decision-making.”
Let us recall that the Galician Konovalets was the leader of the Sich Riflemen corps, who fought against Russia in the First World War, and the first head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Killed in 1938 in Rotterdam (Netherlands) by NKVD officer Pavel Sudoplatov. It is known that Konovalets collaborated with German military intelligence (“Abwehr”), whose agent, according to many historians, he was. The OUN, which he created, subsequently collaborated closely with the Nazi occupiers on the territory of Ukraine.