By Federigo Argentieri Published in Corriere della Sera, supplement La Lettura 15 February 2026
On the eve of the fourth anniversary of the so-called “special military operation” — in other words, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine — the outlines are becoming clearer even of the less visible front of this war: the one fought in the media, across newspapers, television, and social platforms. In Italy, this battle has been — and remains — particularly bitter.
Fortunately, the spontaneous and heartfelt applause that greeted the Ukrainian Olympic delegation at San Siro on Friday, February 6, showed that despite the steady stream of falsehoods and disinformation — amplified especially by certain stubborn television programs — much of the Italian public has maintained a balanced perspective. This is due in no small part to the publication of several serious and well-documented studies. I am thinking in particular of the works of Simone Attilio Bellezza (Identità ucraina. Storia del movimento nazionale dal 1800 a oggi, Laterza, 2024); Yaroslav Hrytsak (Storia dell’Ucraina. Dal Medioevo a oggi, il Mulino, 2023); Simona Merlo (La costruzione dell’Ucraina contemporanea. Una storia complessa, il Mulino, 2023); and Serhii Plokhy (Le porte d’Europa. Storia dell’Ucraina, Mondadori, 2022). These books have helped fill longstanding gaps in public understanding and have cautioned against a number of misleading and dangerous myths.
Foremost among those myths — relentlessly pushed by Russian propaganda — is the claim that a Ukraine fighting for its survival (a survival threatened before) is “Nazi.” “Nazi” is applied to its supposed inspiration, Stepan Bandera; “Nazi” to its intentions, ideology, and more. The fact that several public figures in Italy have uncritically repeated these entirely unfounded claims — loudly and repeatedly — is both damaging and humiliating for the country, even if their influence fortunately appears limited.
Before the current aggression, Ukraine had spent roughly two decades undertaking a comprehensive reassessment of its extraordinarily complex history — a history spanning more than fifteen centuries — grounded in original archival sources, particularly regarding its tragic twentieth century. It is worth recalling that, at least until 2014, Russian scholars did not object to this effort; indeed, they engaged in substantive scholarly dialogue. Today, however, the situation has deteriorated dramatically. There is credible evidence that Russian troops have received orders to destroy cultural institutions — schools, libraries, archives, monuments, and memorial sites — adding to the devastation already inflicted on kindergartens, hospitals, orphanages, and care homes for the elderly.
In this context, the volume edited by historians Volodymyr Viatrovych and Lubomyr Luciuk has been particularly valuable in clarifying key issues. Titled Enemy Archives, the book’s name carries a double meaning: it refers both to OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists)
documents seized by the Soviet Ukrainian NKVD (secret police), and to NKVD documents reflecting on their own operations and on the nationalist movement they were fighting.
Founded in Vienna in early 1929, the OUN had a straightforward objective: the creation of an independent and sovereign Ukrainian state. It is impossible to say whether its formation influenced Stalin’s decision that same year — and with particular brutality — to impose collectivization on the countryside, followed by what the Italian Senate, marking its 90th anniversary in 2023, formally recognized as the genocide by famine of the Ukrainian people: the Holodomor. What is certain is that in a well-known exchange of letters with his close associate Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin expressed his fear of “losing Ukraine.”
During the 1930s, the OUN operated primarily in Poland, carrying out acts of political violence, including assassinations, justified — not entirely without basis — by claims that Warsaw oppressed and discriminated against its substantial Ukrainian minority. In Soviet Ukraine, by contrast, no such activity was possible, due both to sealed borders and to the brutal repressions and purges that followed the famine. Those purges completed the genocidal project by targeting intellectuals and clergy — the second and third pillars of national identity alongside the peasantry.
That Stalin remained attentive to the OUN is evident from the May 1938 assassination of its leader, Yevhen Konovalets. Living in Rome but traveling in Rotterdam on business, he was killed by a bomb delivered by a Soviet agent, Pavel Sudoplatov, who later admitted responsibility in his memoir Incarichi speciali (Rizzoli, 1994).
During the Second World War, the OUN — which split into two factions — attempted tactical cooperation with Nazi Germany. These efforts collapsed whenever the question of genuine Ukrainian independence arose. It is therefore misleading to equate the movement wholesale with “Nazism.” Collaboration did occur in part within the OUN, but no more — and no less — than in many other European countries, from Vichy France to the Norway of Vidkun Quisling, to Italy’s Salò Republic.
At a turning point in the German-Soviet war, between 1942 and 1943, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was formed. Its aim was to fight both Germany and the Soviet Union in pursuit of the OUN’s objective: an independent Ukrainian state. The UPA remained active at least until 1955, with some reported actions even later — including sabotage of tanks bound for Hungary in 1956, an episode conveniently overlooked today by Viktor Orbán — and a final reported action in 1960.
The relentless struggle between the NKVD and the UPA lasted at least a decade. During that time, the Soviet political police faced determined resistance and made serious efforts to understand the underlying reasons for Ukraine’s stubborn refusal to accept renewed Soviet rule. In this respect, internal analyses differed from the crude and simplistic official propaganda, which dismissed everything as “Nazism.” In reality, both the OUN and the UPA embodied Ukrainian aspirations for independence — aspirations that were certainly complex and at times contradictory, but strong enough to endure and survive nearly insurmountable challenges.