Andriy Melnyk

Andriy Atanasovych Melnyk (; 12 December 1890 – 1 November 1964) was a Ukrainian military and political leader best known for leading the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists from 1938 onwards and later the Melnykites (OUN-M) following a split with the more radical Banderite faction (OUN-B) in 1940.

Born in Austrian Galicia, Melnyk volunteered in the Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen at the outbreak of the First World War and was later captured by the Russians in 1916. He escaped captivity in late 1917 and served as a senior officer in the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic during the Ukrainian War of Independence, rising to the rank of colonel. Melnyk went on to cofound the Ukrainian Military Organisation (UVO) in 1920 that continued the armed struggle against Poland in Western Ukraine and which later formed the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in 1929. Following his time in prison between 1924 and 1928 in connection with the Olha Basarab case, he largely stepped back from active engagement in the UVO–OUN underground.

After the assassination of Yevhen Konovalets by the NKVD, Melnyk was selected to lead the OUN and collaborated with Nazi intelligence to plan the largely aborted OUN Uprising of 1939 during the German invasion of Poland. Following the factional split, he continued to direct the OUN-M to collaborate with Nazi Germany during the German invasion of the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front. However, Melnyk had his movements confined to Berlin from mid-1941, though he would continue to advocate collaboration, and was arrested by the Gestapo in January 1944. He was initially held as a in Hirschegg from March, before being moved to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in July.

Melnyk was released in October and taken to Berlin in order to negotiate support for the retreating German Army, assuming a leading role in brokering a common stance between a broad spectrum of Ukrainian nationalist groups represented under the Ukrainian National Committee. However, with the war nearing its end and Nazi officials still rejecting demands for the recognition of an independent Ukrainian state, Melnyk and his supporters withdrew from the committee and travelled west in early 1945 to meet the Allied advance.

Melnyk continued to lead the OUN-M in exile until his death in 1964 and lobbied for the consolidation of Ukrainian diaspora organisations, with the World Congress of Free Ukrainians founded in 1967. In May 2026, the Ukrainian government organised the transfer of Melnyk and his wife Sofia's remains from Luxembourg to Ukraine, whereafter they were reburied with state honours in the National Military Memorial Cemetery, near Kyiv.

Early life and education Andriy Atanasovych Melnyk was born in Volya Yakubov, a village near Drohobych, Galicia, to Maria Kovaliv (d.1894/7) and Atanas Melnyk (d.1905), a public figure who at a relatively young age became village head and set up a local branch of the Prosvita society. Between 1912 and 1914 he studied forestry at the Higher School of Agriculture in Vienna, though his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War.

Captivity Melnyk and his comrades in the USS (including Roman Sushko and ) were transferred between several prisoner-of-war camps, including briefly one in Tsaritsyn, before they were moved to a lightly guarded internment camp in the village of Dubovka as of March 1917. A January decree from Petliura to stem the violence was ineffectual and failed to restore discipline among UNA troops. Melnyk attended a conference in Kyiv on 16 January as a representative of the Rifle Council, alongside other pro-independence parties. At the conference, the Riflemen put forward a proposal to reform the government into a temporary triumvirate military dictatorship consisting of Petliura, Konovalets, and Melnyk on the basis that it would enable them to better meet the demands of the state-building process, though this was rejected by the other parties present including Petliura and the Directorate. Melnyk assumed the position of chief of staff of the wider UNA from March to June and assistant commandant of the Sich Riflemen from July to August. Following the fall of Kyiv and amid a bleak strategic position, the regular army was dissolved in December 1919 upon the switch to partisan warfare. That month, Melnyk fell ill from a typhus epidemic; soon after he was captured by Polish troops at a train station and taken to a hospital in Rivne.

Interwar political activities (1920–1938)

Alongside Konovalets and former Sich Riflemen in August 1920, Melnyk was a founding member of the Ukrainian Military Organisation (UVO), an underground militant group that continued the armed struggle against Poland and engaged in acts of terrorism and assassinations. Earlier that month the UVO had merged with several far-right nationalist student movements to form the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) with Yevhen Konovalets at its head.

Melnyk travelled to the Free City of Danzig where he met in September with Provid member Omelian Senyk who informed him that Konovalets's oral will stated him as his preferred successor whereafter he accompanied Senyk to Vienna and was elected head of the PUN on 14 October. He was chosen by the Provid in part because of the hope for more moderate and pragmatic leadership and due to a desire to repair strained ties with the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Sheptytsky had sharply denounced the OUN for inciting acts of violence against Ukrainians that disapproved of its methods and its radical nationalism and had charged the organisation with morally corrupting the youth.

Support for Carpatho-Ukraine Melnyk took over the leadership in the midst of the Sudetenland Crisis and the OUN's opportunistic support of Carpatho-Ukraine with the organisation initially directing, in his own words, "all [their] forces and means at [their] disposal" to aid them. Melnyk travelled to Prague to meet with the Czech government and despatched Oleh Olzhych to Transcarpathia to represent the PUN, as well as sending others on diplomatic missions, while as many as 2,000 young radicals from Galicia crossed the border. Melnyk later refined the OUN's support to cultural figures and experienced military specialists on the request of Carpatho-Ukrainian leader Avgustyn Voloshyn who had become aware that a number of nationalists, some of whom he derided in his correspondence as "revolutionary shouters", were planning a coup d'état.

Following on from the November 1938 First Vienna Award, itself part of the broader partition of Czechoslovakia, the autonomous region declared its independence from the Second Czechoslovak Republic in March 1939, though Nazi Germany failed to respond to appeals for recognition and the short-lived state was thus invaded and annexed by the Kingdom of Hungary a day later. According to historian Myroslav Shkandrij, the younger generation within the OUN felt that the PUN had failed to provide Carpatho-Ukraine with the necessary support and had overrelied on support from Germany.

Formal ratification as leader At the Second Great Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists in Rome on 27 August 1939, Melnyk was formally ratified as leader of the OUN and reaffirmed its ideology as continuing in the vein of natsiokratiia (literally translating to 'natiocracy'), which has been characterised by scholars as a Ukrainian form of fascism and/or integral nationalism, itself sometimes characterised as proto-fascist, or more broadly as extreme or radical nationalism influenced by fascist movements. At the conference, Melnyk was styled under the title vozhd in the Führerprinzip tradition. In a May 1939 letter to German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Melnyk had claimed that the OUN was "ideologically akin to similar movements in Europe, especially to National Socialism in Germany and Fascism in Italy".

Melnyk and his supporters within the OUN were generally more conservative and less inclined towards the radical anti-clericalism and terror that had characterised the organisation prior, highly regarding the ideology of Vyacheslav Lypynsky while often distancing themselves from Dmytro Dontsov's ideology in public. The elevation of Melnyk to the position of leader exacerbated a generational divide within the organisation between an older, more cautious generation, many of whom had fought in the conflicts surrounding the First World War, and a younger, more bellicose generation heavily inspired by the works of Dontsov that demanded a more charismatic and radical leader and which had begun to coalesce around Stepan Bandera. Bandera had attained notoriety following his role in the assassination of Polish Interior Minister Bronisław Pieracki and the publicity that arose from the 1935 Warsaw and 1936 Lviv trials.

According to John Alexander Armstrong, Melnyk "refused to raise the nation to the level of the absolute" which was likely taken as sign of weakness by much of the more radicalised younger generation. Armstrong posits that taken together with his association with the Church and his calm and dignified disposition that had little resonance among these members, this made Melnyk incapable of managing the generational divide that had been up until then skillfully managed by Konovalets.

Collaboration with Nazi intelligence From 1938 onwards, Melnyk was recruited into the Abwehr for espionage, counter-espionage and sabotage, a relationship that had its roots as far back as 1923 pertaining to the UVO, in return for providing the organisation with financial support. The Abwehr's goal was to run diversion activities after Germany's planned attacks on Poland and the Soviet Union whereby Melnyk assisted in planning the largely aborted OUN Uprising of 1939 and was assigned the codename 'Consul I'. Following the Nazi–Soviet Pact and the German invasion of Poland, Melnyk met with the head of the Eastern Department of the German Foreign Office in Berlin on 3 September 1939 where he was told that Ukrainian armed involvement against Poland neither lay in German nor Ukrainian interests and to reserve his forces.

Wilhelm Canaris later gave the order to ready the OUN group on 11 September and met with Melnyk in Vienna where he directed him to oversee the drafting of a constitution for a west Ukrainian state. Canaris congratulated Melnyk on "the successful resolution of the question of western Ukraine" and asked for a list of government officials. Melnyk instructed Roman Sushko, who was to lead an expedition into Poland, to follow the doctrine of 'building a state from the first village' and transmitted broadcasts from a military radio station in Vienna calling on Ukrainians not to resist the Wehrmacht and to welcome them as liberators.

Sushko's legion was activated on 12 September and, in mid-September, Melnyk joined OUN members at Sambir from where they intended to move their nascent headquarters to Lviv at the earliest opportunity. However, OUN members retreated westwards with the German Army after the USSR commenced their invasion on 17 September. The draft constitution was completed in 1940 by Mykola Stsiborskyi, the OUN's chief theorist and organisational officer, and encompassed the establishment of a totalitarian state under a vozhd (to be Col. Melnyk) with the Ukrainian-Jewish population singled out for distinct and ambiguous citizenship laws.

Split with Bandera and the OUN-M (1940–1941)

In January 1940, and following his release from prison during the Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland that unified Ukrainian lands under the Soviet Union, Bandera travelled to Rome to present Melnyk with a series of demands, among them the replacement of certain members of the Provid with members of the younger generation (Accounts of the remaining demands, written postwar, vary with John Alexander Armstrong treating these sources with trepidation.) Historian Ivan Patryliak reports that Bandera and his entourage wanted the OUN to establish contacts with Western powers while Melnyk's objections were rooted in practical constraints. Patryliak asserts that Melnyk was concerned that the Soviet crackdown that would inevitably follow an attempted 'revolution' would severely weaken the organisation. Patryliak stresses that these discussions occurred in the context of the Nazi-Soviet pact.

On 5 April, Melnyk and Bandera met in Rome in a final unsuccessful attempt to resolve the growing divide between the two emerging factions with Melnyk declaring the Revolutionary Leadership illegal on 7 April and appealing on 8 April to OUN members not to join the 'saboteurs'. Melnyk decided to put the members of the Revolutionary Leadership before the OUN tribunal, in response to which Bandera and Stetsko rejected Melnyk's leadership and responded in kind. Working from their bases in Berlin and Kraków, both factions of the OUN formed marching groups and planned to follow the Wehrmacht into Ukraine during the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union in order to recruit supporters and set up local governments. As soon as the collaborationalist Nachtigall Battalion entered Lviv on June 30, the group of Banderites, directed by Bandera from Kraków, proclaimed an independent Ukrainian state, though the German military authorities caught wind of this and cracked down upon the OUN-B. Bandera was arrested on the eve of the proclamation and the crackdown on the OUN-B was later expanded after the assassination of two Melnykite Provid members in Zhytomyr in August. On 6 July, Melnyk and his fellow former officers of the UNA submitted an appeal addressed to Adolf Hitler through the Abwehr:

According to the historian Yuri Radchenko, Melnyk had a "more or less clear picture" of the Holocaust in Ukraine perpetrated by the Nazis and their local collaborators. The OUN-M's press organs in German-occupied Ukraine published antisemitic propaganda throughout the early 1940s. Radchenko argues that such material could not have been disseminated without Melnyk's knowledge or approval.

Detention in Berlin Having travelled several times between Berlin and Kraków to oversee preparations for the OUN-M expeditions, Melnyk had his movements restricted to Berlin under house arrest in late July, with Gestapo surveillance. In contrast to the OUN-B, Melnyk and his supporters meanwhile avoided making any unilateral proclamations, competing with Bandera's supporters for influence in Western Ukraine and intent on cooperating and gaining favour with the SS and the Wehrmacht in pursuit of a military-political arrangement similar to that of Tiso's Slovakia and Ustaša Croatia. in Kyiv on 5 October, which was intended to serve as the basis for a future Ukrainian state. Initially, Melnyk's supporters enjoyed support against the Banderites from the German military authorities, with some Melnykites informing on OUN-B members. However, alarmed at the OUN-M's growing strength in Eastern and Central Ukraine and taken together with the incompatibility of Ukrainian statehood with Nazi designs on the region, the SS and government officials overruled the Wehrmacht and ordered a crackdown on the organisation with the UNRada dissolved in November 1941, the Melnykite newspaper Ukrainian Word puppeted in December, and many OUN-M members arrested or executed by the SD from November onwards.

With their letters going unanswered, the OUN-M leadership resolved to write an appeal to Hitler in December 1941 'on behalf of all Ukrainians' in which they expressed dissatisfaction at the state of German-Ukrainian cooperation, framing their criticisms of German policy as being intended to notify Hitler "about the real state of affairs in Ukraine". In a letter to Sheptytsky dated 7 July 1942, Melnyk wrote:

Melnyk maintained semi-official contacts with OUN-M activists in Ukraine, intermittently being able to despatch directives. Fellow political prisoner and former French ambassador to Germany André François-Poncet wrote of him in his diary:

In July 1944, Melnyk was moved first to Berlin where on 23 July he was accused of holding political conversations with fellow arrested persons and trying to establish contact with the OUN-M in occupied-Ukraine. , a group of senior Melnykites, acting in coordination with Melnyk, submitted a memorandum to the U.S. military administration requesting that displaced Ukrainians be treated as a distinct national group, separated from Poles and Russians, and permitted to display the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag. This was general policy for displaced persons after the war. (According to Antons, the Western Allies didn't officially recognise a Ukrainian nationality out of fear for antagonising the USSR, with Ukrainians in the camp listed as stateless, undetermined, or other.) At the Third Great Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists in 1947, Melnyk was elected head of the OUN-M for life. Together with President of the UPR in exile Andriy Livytskyi, Melnyk supported the reconstitution of the Ukrainian National Rada in July 1948 which thereon served as the legislative body of the UPR in exile and sought to unify Ukrainian émigré organisations in Europe for further consolidation with the Pan-American Ukrainian Conference that had been formed in November 1947. However, the Union of Hetman Statesmen objected to the associations with the UPR and the OUN-B left in 1950 after demanding a more central role. In 1954, Melnyk contributed a collection of eulogies of OUN and OUN-M members to a book marking the 25th anniversary of the creation of the OUN.

Following an address to the Ukrainian National Federation of Canada in May 1957, Melnyk began to actively lobby the Ukrainian diaspora for the establishment of a pan-Ukrainian umbrella organisation capable of accommodating the fragmented landscape of diaspora organisations. The OUN-M withdrew from the UNRada in October 1957, rejoining in 1961.

Leaders of the OUN-M and OUN-B, including Melnyk, Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko, Mykola Kapustiansky, and Dmytro Andriievsky (OUN-M) attended a ceremony at Konovalets's grave in Rotterdam on 23 May 1958 to mark the 20th anniversary of his assassination.

Death and legacy

Melnyk died in Cologne, West Germany, on 1 November 1964 at the age of 73, and was buried at Bonnevoie cemetery, Luxembourg. In late 2006, and as a result of a meeting between modern OUN-M leader Mykola Plaviuk and administration officials, Lviv City Council announced plans to transfer the tombs of Melnyk, Konovalets, Bandera and other key leaders of the OUN and UPA to a new area of Lychakiv Cemetery specifically dedicated to the Ukrainian national liberation struggle, though this was not implemented.

On the basis of the Ukrainian decommunisation laws passed by the Verkhovna Rada in 2015, Melnyk is legally recognised in Ukraine as one of the fighters for Ukrainian independence in the 20th century.

Following a campaign by modern OUN-M activists, a second monument to Melnyk was unveiled in Ivano-Frankivsk in 2017. In December 2020, the Museum-Estate of the Leader of the Ukrainian National Liberation Movement Andriy Melnyk was opened in Volya Yakubova to coincide with the 130th anniversary of his birth. The Museum-Estate is situated in a house that was owned by his relatives since his parents' house is no longer standing. As of 2023, Melnyk's grave was maintained by members of the Union of Ukrainian Women in Luxembourg. Streets are named after Melnyk in Drohobych, Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv, Rivne, Bila Tserkva, Cherkasy, and, since 2023, Kyiv.

Reburial On 19 May 2026, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced plans to transfer the remains of Melnyk and his wife Sofia to Ukraine. Zelenskyy described them as "iconic Ukrainians of the twentieth century who are deeply respected", further stating: "The Ukrainian people deserve their historical memory— and we are strengthening this true memory". On the same day the remains of Melnyk and Sofia were exhumed from their graves in Luxembourg for transportation to Ukraine.

The ashes returned to Ukrainian soil via Uzhhorod on 21 May and on 23 May a memorial service was held in honour of the couple in Kyiv's Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ in the presence of deputy head of Office of the President of Ukraine Iryna Vereshchuk, speaker of the Main Directorate of Intelligence Andriy Yusov, head of the Institute of National Memory Oleksandr Alfiorov and head of the OUN-M Bohdan Chervak. On 25 May, Melnyk and Sofia were reburied with full state honours in the National Military Memorial Cemetery, near Kyiv, in a ceremony attended by Zelenskyy, Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko, Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Kyrylo Budanov, Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Ruslan Stefanchuk, and former president Viktor Yushchenko. The Ukrainian government also announced plans to repatriate the remains of Yevhen Konovalets and to establish a National Pantheon for distinguished Ukrainians. In his remarks, Zelenskyy stated:

Israel's Foreign Ministry and the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial centre condemned Melnyk being given a state burial, with Vad Yashem stating: "Honoring the leader of a movement that supported and collaborated with Nazi Germany during the persecution and murder of millions of Jews undermines the moral integrity essential to Holocaust remembrance".

Views Fascism Melnyk was not an ideologue of the OUN and did not author works in the interwar period where he set out his views. The Ideological and Political Commission of the 1939 Second Great Congress was headed by Mykola Stsiborskyi. Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe surmises that Melnyk "seems also to have been an adherent to fascism", referring to Stsiborskyi, Yevhen Onatsky, and Dmytro Dontsov to whom he also applies the designation.

Historian Yuri Radchenko describes Melnyk as "one of the fascist leaders or right-wing radical leaders of Europe, leaders of fascist movements," up until 1945, noting that such a designation is a matter of preference among historians. Historian Marek Wojnar considers most of Melnyk's followers to instead fall into the 'radical right' classification in Stanley G. Payne's categorisation of authoritarian nationalist groups that divides them into fascism, radical right, and conservative authoritarian right.

Jews As one of the generals of the UNA during the Ukrainian independence war, Melnyk attempted to suppress the anti-Jewish pogroms. Radchenko suggests that his views on Jews may have undergone a radicalisation in the interwar period, likely against the background of the Schwartzbard trial, though he notes that there are no records of him espousing an opinion on the subject. Radchenko bases this on his belief that the antisemitic propaganda of the OUN-M in the early 1940s could not have been published without Melnyk's knowledge.

Poles According to Timothy Snyder, the OUN-M were "in principle committed to the same ideas" as the OUN-B with regards to an ethnically homogenous state while historian Yuriy Shapoval cites Polish intelligence sources from 1927 to 1934 that characterise Melnyk as holding hostile views towards Poles. However, Snyder also asserts that the OUN-M didn't see the Volhynia massacres as feasible nor desirable while historians Yuri Radchenko and Andrii Usach note that individual Melnykite activists opposed the ethnic cleansing of Poles, suggesting that this may have been concentrated around Melnyk's second-in-command Oleh Olzhych.