Ukraine: Return of the Dead in the story board’s war
All nations choose their heroes. Few have the privilege of choosing heroes without shadows.
Ukraine Is No Exception
As the war against Russia continues and Kyiv advances its rapprochement with the European Union, Ukrainian authorities have launched a series of memory-related initiatives that have generated both support at home and questions abroad. The official reburial of Andriy Melnyk, tributes paid to the UPA, and plans to establish a National Pantheon have brought back into the spotlight figures whom some regard as heroes of independence and others as collaborators of the Third Reich.
Behind the controversy lies a deeper question: how does a nation at war construct its historical narrative and choose those who are meant to embody it?
Kyiv Looks Toward Brussels While Exhuming Its Past
Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion, Volodymyr Zelensky has made integration into the European Union one of his country’s primary strategic objectives. Ukraine presents itself as a European democracy defending its sovereignty, the rule of law, and its right to join the Western political family.
Yet in the spring of 2026, several initiatives revived a debate that the war had never entirely erased.
The official reburial of Andriy Melnyk in the presence of the Ukrainian president, the awarding of the title “Heroes of the UPA” to a special forces unit, and the project to create a “Pantheon of Outstanding Ukrainians” triggered critical reactions in Israel, within Yad Vashem, and in Poland.
The paradox is obvious.
Ukraine seeks its place within the European Union while rehabilitating certain figures whom several European countries continue to regard as irreversibly compromised by their association with Nazism. This apparent contradiction now lies at the heart of a memory battle that extends far beyond the issue of gravesites and official ceremonies.
A Ukrainian History Different from the Western Narrative
To understand this phenomenon, one must move beyond a strictly Western reading of history.
Western Europe has largely built its collective memory around the Second World War, the defeat of Nazism, and the remembrance of the Holocaust.
Ukraine’s historical experience is different. For a significant portion of the Ukrainian population, the defining traumas also include the Holodomor, Stalinist purges, deportations, and several decades of Soviet domination.
This difference in perspective is essential.
For their supporters, Melnyk, Bandera, Konovalets, Shukhevych, and Stetsko primarily symbolize the determination to build an independent Ukrainian state at a time when such a prospect seemed unattainable.
For their critics, those same figures remain inseparable from collaboration with Nazi Germany, anti-Jewish pogroms, or the massacres of Polish populations in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.
The historical facts are extensively documented. What remains contested is their place within the national narrative.
A Rehabilitation That Raises Questions Among Ukraine’s Allies
The official reburial of Andriy Melnyk is not merely a commemorative event. It marks the deliberate incorporation of a controversial figure of Ukrainian nationalism into the state’s official narrative.
A few days later, the awarding of the title “Heroes of the UPA” to a Ukrainian special forces unit confirmed that the initiative was not an isolated one.
The future National Pantheon, intended to house the remains of several twentieth-century nationalist leaders, further illustrates a coherent memory policy.
The problem is that several of these individuals remain associated, both in historical scholarship and in Polish and Jewish collective memory, with movements that collaborated with Nazi Germany or participated in mass crimes against civilian populations.
The issue is therefore no longer merely historical.
It has become political.
How can Ukraine persuade Europe to share a common destiny while rehabilitating figures who occupy such a controversial place in Europe’s twentieth-century memory?
Why Now?
The question of timing is probably the most revealing.
Why these reburials today?
Why this Pantheon now?
Why this acceleration of memory politics at a moment when Ukraine is going through one of the most difficult phases of the war?
A first explanation lies in the very nature of existential conflicts.
All nations confronted with a major threat look to their past for figures capable of embodying national continuity.
France invoked Joan of Arc centuries after her death. Poland elevated its insurgents to the status of national symbols. Israel built part of its collective narrative around its pioneers and founding struggles.
Ukraine is no exception to this pattern.
After several years of war, Kyiv appears determined to place the current conflict within a longer historical continuum. The implicit message is that the struggle against Russia did not begin in 2022—or even in 2014. Rather, it represents the continuation of an older fight for the existence of an independent Ukrainian nation.
The dead of the past are thus being called upon to strengthen the narrative of the present.
The Trap of Imperfect Heroes
History rarely provides heroes without shadows.
France itself is familiar with this reality. Joan of Arc has crossed the centuries while constantly changing political meaning. Marshal Pétain remains both the victor of Verdun and the leader of the Vichy regime. Nations often learn to live with the contradictions embedded in their own memory.
Ukraine now finds itself facing a comparable dilemma, even though the historical context is radically different.
The figures it seeks to include in its Pantheon carry multiple memories at once: the memory of national independence, the struggle against Moscow, but also that of collaboration, compromise, and crimes that continue to leave deep marks on neighboring societies.
The debate is less about the facts themselves than about how those facts should be prioritized and interpreted.
A Battle for the Postwar Era
At its core, the current controversy extends far beyond the question of graves, reburials, or official ceremonies. It touches on one of the most delicate challenges any nation can face: telling its history without erasing its darker chapters.
For behind the repatriated coffins, Ukraine is not merely debating its past. It is choosing the symbolic foundations of its future.
Wars produce heroes. Nations produce pantheons. But when the heroes of some remain the executioners of others, memory ceases to be a simple act of tribute.
It becomes a battlefield.
Conclusion
The reader is therefore confronted with a question that Ukraine is probably not the only nation required to answer:
Can a nation at war construct the narrative it needs in order to survive without reopening the historical wounds of those with whom it claims to build its future?
Ukraine is discovering today what other nations have learned before it: building a national narrative is often easier than choosing the individuals who are meant to embody.
