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LEV GOLINKIN:
He has not, as far as I know. Zelensky has condemned this unit, SS Galichina, in 2021, when there was a march in its honor in Kyiv. So he condemned it in 2021. He’s been silent since, as far as this incident.
I’ll tell you this, Amy: As soon as I saw the news that he was described as a fighter for Ukraine’s independence against Russia, I knew that he was a Nazi collaborator. The only question, the first question that just went through my mind, was: Which unit was he in? Because that’s a euphemism that they use to say, you know, “We didn’t fight for Germany; we fought against Russia.” It’s a cheap rhetorical trick, because when they fought against Russia, they were fighting alongside and under command of Nazi Germany.
And honestly, I have been shocked, because I have reported on Canada’s dark history in taking in Nazi collaborators, including in The Nation about
Canada’s Nazi monuments, which they have monuments to this exact division. This is a country that on its soil has monuments celebrating the
Waffen-SS, as does the United States. So, in many ways, Yaroslav Hunka belonged up in the Parliament, because he was there as part of a country
that took in at least 2,000 SS Galichina vets, 2,000 of these Waffen-SS soldiers from a division that committed horrific war crimes.
And one of the interesting things is, because they were taken in partly because they were enemies of the USSR, so it was Cold War politics, but — and this is something that gets often lost — an ancillary benefit for why Canada took them in was the using them as strike breakers to break the powers of the unions. The unions were growing strong after World War II, and these men were organized and ready to act as strike breakers. So, this is a dark part of Canada’s domestic policy and foreign policy together.
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