Red-and-black banners like the one held aloft by Freeland on Sunday evening were the official battle flag of the so-called Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the paramilitary wing of the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). The groups, which comprised heavilof Nazi collaborators, received funding by the Central Intelligence Agency for much of the 20th century. They became infamous for terrorizing Ukraine’s Jewish population alongside German death squads, especially after perpetrating the brutal Lviv pogroms which took the lives of tens of thousands of Ukrainian and Polish Jews in 1941. “We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,” read one of their typically anti-semitic propaganda leaflets aimed at the city’s Jewish population at the time. Freeland’s own uncle, historian and author John-Paul Himka, has estimated that the OUN-UPA were responsible for the deaths of well over 100,000 Jews during the Holocaust.
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