Stephen Bandera, Pianoboy, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy
This may or may not be a coincidence:
1. When Stephen Bandera (1909-1959) was elected head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, fighting for an independent Ukraine, he said “Thank you for the sentence.” He could have meant a death sentence, or maybe just a kind of servitude.
2. In 2015 Volodymyr Zelenskyy came up with the idea for a satirical TV series about a high school history teacher who accidentally becomes president of Ukraine. One of his students makes a video with his phone of the character ranting against government corruption and saying “Give me a week as President and I’ll fix things” then posts it. The theme song for the show, Servant of the People, Dmytro Shurov, also known as Pianoboy, contains the worlds “Everybody knows what I am sentenced to: Servant of the People” and “On my belly I have a tattoo: ‘Servant of the People.’” When Zelenskyy decided to run for president, he formed the Servant of the People party and won, a case of life imitating art.
You can watch the whole three-season series on Netflix. Or you can watch the first episode for free on YouTube with good subtitles. It begins with the three oligarchs who control Ukrainian politics discussing the upcoming election. It’s fun. Take a look.
3. Ukraine had been at war against Russia for eight years when Russia escalated it on February 24, 2022, planning to occupy the rest of the county. The US offered to get President Zelenskyy and his government out so they could set up a government in exile. Zelenskyy’s response was immediately famous:
“The fight is here. I need weapons, not a ride,”
Boris Johnson and others keep saying how brave that was, but Zelenskyy said “I am not brave. I am responsible.” This is the sentence he has accepted: to be the servant of the people and do whatever that job requires.
If this is not a coincidence, it is a thread of some sort.
Here’s where a word about Bandera would be in order. He is highly controversial person. In 2016, two years after Russia first began attacking Ukraine, the Ukrainian government decided to change the name of Moscow Avenue in Kyiv to Bandera Avenue, referring to his patriotic aspect, but this was contested, especially by rabbis, because of Bandera’s antisemitism. After the 2022 invasion it was renamed Heroes of Kharkiv.
As leaders, Bandera and Zelenskyy have little in common besides devotion to Ukrainian independence. Zelenskyy is a Jewish president of a pluralistic country whose population is united by their sense of Ukrainian nationality and commitment to democracy.
According to Yale Professor Timothy Snyder, Bandera aimed to make Ukraine into a one-party fascist dictatorship without national minorities. He collaborated with the Nazis and his followers murdered Poles and Jews. Both his nationalism and his acts of terrorism got him in trouble. He spent years in Polish and Nazi confinement and eventually was killed in Berlin by a Soviet KGB assassin. The assassin used a double-barreled Soviet poison gun which sprayed cyanide into the face of victims. It killed them instantly and left no trace, so the victims were declared dead of a heart attack because symptoms apparently are similar.
There are Ukrainians who really don’t know much about him except his fierce dedication to Ukrainian independence and are proud to call themselves Banderites. This is unfortunate because anything a Ukrainian does in the way of praising Bandera supports Putin’s narrative that Ukraine is a Nazi country. Russians call Ukrainians both fascists and Banderites interchangeably.
Slava Ukraini! Heroyam slava!
Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!