On August 18, 2026, Yevhen Konovalets was reburied at Ukraine’s National Military Memorial Cemetery near Kyiv. His remains had been exhumed at Rotterdam’s Crooswijk cemetery on August 11 and returned to Ukraine on August 13, ending an 88-year period in which one of the most important figures of the Ukrainian independence movement remained buried abroad.

For Ukraine, the symbolism is direct: Konovalets fought for Ukrainian statehood when that state failed to survive, and he has returned while another generation is again defending Ukrainian independence against Russia. For an Israeli reader, however, the story is considerably more complicated, because the name Konovalets leads almost immediately to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, antisemitism, World War II and the wider argument over how Ukraine remembers its nationalist movement.

I write about Israel, Ukraine and the historical connections between the two countries for The Times of Israel Blogs and NAnews. In preparing this article, I returned to archival references, biographical material and the earlier NAnews — Israel News investigation into Konovalets and the Jews around the Ukrainian independence movement. I am not presenting myself as a professional academic historian; where the documents establish a fact, I state it, and where they leave uncertainty, that uncertainty should remain visible.

August 18 changed the tense: Konovalets is no longer “returning”

Until only a few days ago, the story was about a return that was still taking place. Now the date matters: on August 18, Konovalets was formally reburied at the National Military Memorial Cemetery, with President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukrainian officials, military personnel and clergy participating in the ceremony.

Zelensky placed the event inside Ukraine’s present-day understanding of its own statehood. The idea is not merely that an émigré political figure has been brought home, but that a commander from the failed Ukrainian state-building project of 1917–1921 has returned to an independent country with its own army, flag and political institutions.

There is also an important distinction that can easily disappear in headlines. The National Military Memorial Cemetery is the place where Konovalets has now been reburied, but Ukrainian memory institutions have described this as an interim stage: after the Ukrainian National Pantheon is established, his remains are expected to be moved there. The cemetery and the future Pantheon are therefore connected, but they are not the same thing.

This distinction matters because Ukraine is not simply transporting historical remains. It is constructing a hierarchy of national memory while fighting a war for its own survival, and the figures it places in that story will inevitably be examined outside Ukraine as well.

Before the OUN, there was the Ukrainian People’s Republic

For many Israelis, Konovalets enters history through three letters: OUN. Yet his political and military biography began much earlier. Born in 1891 near Lviv, he served in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, was captured by Russia, and after the Russian Revolution became one of the organizers of the Sich Riflemen in Kyiv.

He later commanded the Sich Riflemen Corps of the Army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the UPR. That state existed during the revolutionary upheaval that followed the collapse of the Russian Empire and fought, among other enemies, Bolshevik forces seeking to establish control over Ukraine.

The chronology is essential. The Ukrainian Military Organization, or UVO, was created in 1920 after the defeat of the UPR, while the OUN was founded only in 1929. By the time Konovalets became the OUN’s first leader, he had already spent more than a decade in military and political activity connected with the attempt to establish an independent Ukrainian state.

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