https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/world/europe/ukraine-melnyk-nationalist-collaborator.html

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 — and who has been no less divisive after death than in life — lay in state in Kyiv before his reburial on Sunday.

President Volodymyr Zelensky provided full state honors for the ritual, signaling a deep shift in Ukrainian politics after Russia’s invasion in 2022. Before then, Mr. Zelensky had kept nationalist politics at arm’s length; in the reburial, he embraced them.

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’s war funerals.

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.

Before Russia’s 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.

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.

After the invasion, Mr. Zelensky warmed to the World War II history of partisan resistance against the Soviets. That year, he awarded a 99-year-old veteran of the Ukrainian Partisan Army the country’s highest military honor, Hero of Ukraine.

This month, Mr. Zelensky went a step further by repatriating Melnyk’s remains for burial in the new military cemetery, elevating him to the country’s pantheon of heroes.

“Something that Ukrainians and Ukraine have long hoped” for was underway, he said as the cremated remains were en route back to Ukraine. He described Melnyk and his wife, Sofia Fedak-Melnyk, who was reburied beside her husband, as “iconic Ukrainians of the 20th century who are deeply respected.”

To be sure, right-wing parties have had historically low support in Ukraine, and none cleared the threshold to enter Parliament in the last election before the invasion, in 2019. But Mr. Zelensky’s embrace of Melnyk, a figure previously revered most fervently by the right, is telling of a wartime shift, an unintended consequence of the war for Russia.

The move is also a significant step for Mr. Zelensky, Ukraine’s first Jewish president, in formalizing the national commemoration of a figure criticized as a Nazi collaborator while also honored in Ukraine as an independence fighter.