UKRAINE marked the birthday of nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera today as a national holiday for the first time.

The parliament voted that January 1 would be officially recognised for the leader of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which fought alongside the nazis against the Red Army in the second world war and whose quest for an “ethnically pure” Ukraine saw it participate in the Holocaust, murdering tens of thousands of Jews and Poles.

Though Bandera demanded the “destruction” of Jews, Poles, “Moskali” — as he termed Russians in Ukraine — and Hungarians and the OUN’s programme pledged to “combat the Jews as the prop of the Muscovite-Bolshevik regime,” Kiev now states he was “an outstanding figure and theorist of the Ukrainian national liberation movement.”