KIEV (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 02nd January, 2022) Around 3,500 Ukrainians holding torches marched through central Kiev on Saturday in an annual tribute to a controversial wartime nationalist leader, Stepan Bandera, according to the national police estimates.
"Events to mark the 113th anniversary of Stepan Bandera went off without violations (of public order). Some 3,500 citizens attended," the police said in a statement.
Demonstrators were carrying Bandera's portraits, flags of nationalist parties and white-red-white banners associated with the Belarusian opposition, a Sputnik correspondent said.
Ukrainian national police stepped up presence across the country for the duration of 56 mass gatherings in 20 provinces honoring the 20th-century nationalist figure.
The rally in Kiev is organized every year on January 1 by the right-wing Svoboda party to mark the anniversary of the man who remains an iconic figure for Ukrainian nationalists for leading an anti-Soviet insurgency, despite his role in massacres of Polish Jews in western Ukraine and collaboration with Nazis. Russia calls the rallies an act of Nazi glorification.
