Russia’s embassy in Austria has condemned Vienna for what it said was the authorities’ “effective indulgence” of a march by Ukrainian ultra-nationalists to mark the birthday of Stepan Bandera.
In a statement posted on Friday, the embassy expressed “nothing but deep disgust” at what it called a provocative stunt by a “handful” of Ukrainian radicals. The embassy stated that such actions constitute “a direct insult to the memory of the victims of Nazism and a blatant challenge to public morality.”
Bandera, a convicted terrorist who had been serving time in Poland for plotting to kill their interior minister, was freed by the Nazis and collaborated with them during World War II with the intention of creating a Ukrainian state aligned with Germany.
A neo-fascist march to celebrate the birthday of Stepan Bandera, described as a mass murderer and collaborator of Hitler’s Third Reich, took place in Lviv, Ukraine, on January 1, 2026. The event was part of a pattern of demonstrations that have occurred in Vienna both in 2023 and 2024.
During previous demonstrations, about 100 members of the Ukrainian diaspora walked from the nation’s parliament to the Russian embassy.
Bandera’s followers (the OUN-B and later the UPA) committed horrific atrocities during WWII, including the massacre of 60,000–100,000 Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, as well as participating in the Holocaust. Despite this, he was declared a national hero in Ukraine in 2010 under President Viktor Yushchenko.
Russia has long accused Ukraine of glorifying Nazi collaborators and promoting neo-Nazi ideology, and has repeatedly confronted EU nations for turning a blind eye to such movements.