...The Speaker of the House of Commons, Anthony Rota — who had compared Zelenskyy to Winston Churchill —
recognized a “veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians and continues to support the troops today even at his age of 98.”
[...]
...SS Galichina
This is the same unit that is honored by controversial
monuments in Canada, Australia, and, as the
Forward recently
exposed, the suburbs of
Philadelphia and Detroit. Jewish groups have called for their removal.
[...]
Formed in 1943, SS Galichina was composed of recruits from the Galicia region in western Ukraine. The unit was armed and trained by the Nazis and commanded by German officers. In 1944, the division was visited by SS head Heinrich Himmler, who spoke of the soldiers’
willingness to slaughter Poles.”
Three months earlier, SS Galichina subunits perpetrated what is known as the Huta Pieniacka
massacre, burning 500 to 1,000 Polish villagers alive.
[...]
After the war, thousands of SS Galichina veterans were allowed to resettle in the West,
around 2,000 of them in Canada. By then, the unit was universally known as the First Ukrainian Division.
A blog by an association of its veterans, called “Combatant News” in Ukrainian, includes an autobiographical
entry by a Yaroslav Hunka that says he volunteered to join the division in 1943 and several
photographs of him during the war. The
captions say the pictures show Hunka during SS artillery training in Munich in December 1943 and in Neuhammer (now Świętoszów), Poland, the site of Himmler’s visit.
[...]
Canada has two monuments to the unit, one in a
Wayville, which is outside Toronto, the other in
Edmonton. Canadian Jewish organizations have called for their removal.
It is
unclear whether Zelenskyy knew that Hunka fought with the unit. In 2021, the Ukrainian president
joined
the governments of Israel and Germany in denouncing a march honoring SS Galichina in Kyiv.