Rotterdam’s Crooswijk cemetery has held Yevhen Konovalets since May 23, 1938, the day Pavel Sudoplatov’s bomb, hidden in a chocolate box, killed the OUN founder on Coolsingel. His grave carries no Ukrainian state marker, and Kyiv has never formally requested repatriation.
A Dutch Grave Without a State Marker
Dutch municipal records list plot 4046. The headstone was paid for by veterans’ donations in 1948, and it names him commander of the Ukrainian Military Organization and OUN. His remains are the only permanent Ukrainian political grave in the Netherlands.
Crooswijk’s administration keeps the lease renewable in ten-year cycles, with the next expiry in 2031. If Ukraine fails to act before then, Rotterdam may reassign the plot under its inactive graves policy. Konovalets lies 2,100 kilometers from Lviv, where a cenotaph stands.
Bandera’s Munich Ritual
In Munich’s Waldfriedhof, plot 43, Stepan Bandera lies under a gravestone carved with a tryzub, killed by a KGB agent’s cyanide pistol on 15 October 1959. Each year on 1 January, his birthday, several hundred diaspora Ukrainians gather at the grave with blue-and-yellow flags and vichyta wreaths, a ritual that survived the Soviet Union and now draws visitors from Kyiv, Lviv, and Ivano-Frankivsk.
The grave has been vandalised twice since 2014, most recently with red paint in 2021, and Munich police still record it as a protected site.
Bodies are movable; so is memory.
The Empty Tomb of Shukhevych
Roman Shukhevych died on March 5, 1950, in the village of Bilohorshcha, now within Lviv’s city limits. MGB troops surrounded his safe house and shot him during an attempted breakout. Soviet authorities never released his body to relatives, and no confirmed grave site exists.
A symbolic cenotaph stands in Lviv’s Lychakiv Cemetery, but it holds no remains. This absence leaves the pantheon with an empty tomb where its most militarily significant UPA commander should lie. Any reburial effort would first require locating bone fragments in unmarked NKVD pits near Lviv, a task Ukrainian forensic teams have not completed. Until then, Shukhevych’s memorialization remains architectural and rhetorical rather than physical, weakening the pantheon’s claim to house the actual dead of the underground.
Scattered Bones Across Western Europe
Andriy Melnyk died in Luxembourg in 1964 and lies in Bonn, a city he never chose as home, buried among German civilians in a plot maintained only by émigré donations. Yaroslav Stetsko outlived his rival by two decades, dying in Munich in 1986; his grave sits in the Waldfriedhof, far from the Lviv streets where he proclaimed restoration of Ukrainian statehood on June 30, 1941.
Dmytro Kliachkivskyi ordered the clearing of Volhynia as UPA commander. He was killed in an ambush near Orzhiv on February 12, 1945, and his remains were never recovered. All three died on foreign soil or disappeared into it. Their bones lie scattered across Western Europe without a common marker. Repatriating them would place their deaths in the same national frame as their lives.
Kyiv’s Legal Monopoly on Heroism
In 2015, Ukraine’s parliament passed four decommunization laws. They banned Soviet and Nazi symbols, and they legally recognized the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) as participants in the struggle for Ukrainian statehood in the twentieth century. Public denial of that status became an administrative offense.
In December 2018, the Verkhovna Rada voted to designate OUN and UPA fighters as “fighters for Ukrainian independence.” Their veterans would now receive the same social protections as other combatants. This legislative sequence fixed a single national definition of hero: not those who fought for Moscow, but those who fought for an independent Ukraine. By doing so, Kyiv claimed exclusive authority over its own memory, leaving no room for Polish, Russian, or Western reinterpretations of Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych, or Yevhen Konovalets. The right to say who is a Ukrainian hero belongs to Ukraine alone.
