The irony grows even greater as over the winter we celebrated the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Kiev and the heart of Ukraine from the Nazi tyranny. Yet the current interim government in Kiev which was established, not by democratic process and lawful elections, but through a violent coup, is already moving to lift the ban on expressions of Nazism that was maintained by all previous Ukrainian governments of both the left and right since national independence at the end of 1991.

The May 2 horrific events in Odessa reminded many of its citizens of the similar tragedy in Katyn, a village in Belarus where on March 22, 1943, the entire population was massacred by the 118th Schutzmannschaft Nazi battalion, The battalion was formed in July 1942 in Kiev and was made up mostly of Ukrainian nationalists from Western Ukraine and collaborators.