January 2016: a rally in honour of wartime nationalist Bandera's birthday in Kyiv, Ukraine. (c) Sergei Chuzavkov / AP / Press Association Images. All rights reserved.Recently, Ukraine has got the west’s attention. Views diverge as to why. Is it the site of an inspiring Revolution of Dignity or a hotbed of post-Soviet corruption? The battleground of a new Cold War or a symbol of short-sighted European foreign policy? A beacon of western values at the “gates of Europe” or a dead end of reform ruled by perennial oligarchs? All, some, or one of the above?
The one thing agreed on is that what happens in Ukraine does not stay in Ukraine. This is true about the past as well. With Europe in a deepening identity crisis, the continent’s violent history in the last century still haunts European politics.
And there are few countries where the dark forces of Europe’s recent past have clashed as fiercely as in Ukraine: two world wars, Nazism and Stalinism, right-wing nationalism and communist authoritarianism, murderous famine, ethnic cleansing and genocide have all left their scars.
