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KIEV: Fighters from a Ukrainian World War Two guerrilla movement and their backers gathered on Saturday to demand official recognition as war combatants despite resistance from pro-Russian groups and Red Army veterans.
Riot police halted several hundred leftists who had intended to march down Kiev's main street to confront veterans marking the 64th anniversary of the founding of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which fought both Nazi invaders and Soviet forces.
Minor scuffles erupted, but there was no repeat of the running street battles that marked commemorations a year ago.
A handful of elderly UPA fighters, surrounded by 3,000 sympathisers, filed through the city centre holding aloft a giant blue and yellow national flag and massing by 11th century St Sofia Cathedral, one of Orthodoxy's most sacred shrines.
“Glory to the nation!” marchers shouted, recalling UPA's wartime slogan. Comrades echoed back: “Death to our Enemies!”
Unhealed wartime wounds expose gaps pitting Ukraine's nationalist west, more prone to seek inspiration in the West, against the Russian-speaking east, more sympathetic to Moscow.
Nationalists want authorities to grant the dwindling number of UPA fighters status as war combatants with veterans' pensions. Leftists denounce any such notion as an affront to the memory of more than 27 million Soviet war dead.
“We don't expect this government or president to solve this issue,” said UPA veteran Teodor Yachun, 79, medals gleaming on his green uniform. “We see no light at the end of the tunnel, only darkness.”
President Viktor Yushchenko, brought to power with the help of nationalists in the 2004 “Orange Revolution”, is cautious on recognition. Veterans are wary of his calls for reconciliation, citing postwar Germany and Spain following its civil war.
“How can you possibly reconcile a victim with his hangman?” Yachun said.
Nationalists repressed when Moscow seized western Ukraine from Poland in 1939 under the Nazi-Soviet pact joined the UPA en masse under Nazi occupation to try to win an independent state.
At its peak in 1943, UPA had 100,000 men in its ranks. The very mention of UPA and its leader Stepan Bandera was virtually a post-war criminal offence as its fighters continued to resist Soviet rule well into the 1950s.
Tens of thousands of other Ukrainians donned Nazi uniforms and fought the Red Army in a unit known as the SS Galicia.
Soviet Ukraine suffered huge losses in what many Russians and Ukrainians still refer to as the Great Patriotic War.
