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Originally Posted by Locke
You can say he was 'fighting for the liberation of Ukraine' but seriously? Thats BS. In the 1940s that wasnt even realistically a thing. That wasnt even on the table. There were more pressing matters afoot.
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"The liberation of Ukraine" is nominally why a lot of Ukrainians fought with and against the Nazis in WW2. That it may not have been "realistically on the table" was secondary to people who had lived through the Holodomor.
The Ukrainian partisans put their lot in with the Nazis because many of the leaders of the independence movements were nationalists who hated Poles, Romanians, Hungarians, and of course Russians, for their own reasons. People like Stepan Bandera did want an independent Ukraine... but one which was homogeneously Ukrainian.
It's not unlike the Finns, really. They fought a defensive war against the Soviets, then fought alongside the Nazis when the Nazis launched Operation Barbarossa, then switched sides again and fought against the Nazis. They had their own reasons for doing what they did. However, the big difference is the Finns didn't participate in the Nazis' other genocidal activities, never handing over Jews and people from other ethnic groups to the Nazis. The Ukrainian nationalists, generally, did.
History is complicated. It's hard to put it all in simple, straightforward terms. E.g. the US propped up Lon Nol in Cambodia in the early '70s, pulled out of Vietnam and let the NVA roll in and take over the south, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia, and although his regime and the North Vietnamese were both communists the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in '78 and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. But the US, at the diplomatic world stage, still supported Pol Pot for years afterward, even though he was a madman who starved millions of his own people.
Should Canadian parliament give standing ovations to people like Hunka? No. Should they celebrate our former Soviet allies from the end of WW2? Well... no.