Please provide some links or historical context for this assertion. According to every historical record I can find, the military actions of OUN-UPA were not defensive in nature, and were not conducted directly against Russia.
Rather, they were conducted against Poles and Jews in Galicia and Poland, where the OUN-UPA massacred thousands of innocent men, women and children.
This is from Wikipedia:
"The OUN, that emulated the Nazi's organizational system, closely collaborated with other fascist states and movements, particularly in Germany, but also in Italy, Japan, Romania and Spain, many were Nazi agents...Even before the war, impressed by the successes of fascism, OUN radicalised its stance, and it saw Nazi Germany as its main ally in the fight for independence."
This is from the Encyclopedia Britannia on the Volhynia massacres:
"The peak of the massacres took place in July and August 1943. Most of the victims were women and children. UPA's methods were particularly brutal, with many of the victims being tortured and mutilated, and resulted in 40,000–60,000 Polish deaths in Volhynia and 30,000–40,000 in Eastern Galicia, with the other regions for the total about 100,000.
"The killings were directly linked with the policies of the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) and its military arm, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, whose goal as specified at the Second Conference of the OUN-B on 17–23 February 1943 (or March 1943 according to other sources) was to purge all non-Ukrainians from the future Ukrainian state".
From the New York Times:
"Between 1943 and 1945, members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army massacred thousands of Poles throughout Volhynia, a region that was in Nazi-occupied Poland and is part of present-day Ukraine. Polish historians say the death toll could be as high as 100,000".
The OUN-UPA resistance against the Soviet Union was not born of some "defensive" instinct on the part of patriotic Ukrainians against the Russian "oppressor". Rather, the hatred the OUN-UPA felt against the Russians was born of the ancestral and traditional hatred that the Austrian-Galicians felt toward Slavs and other non-Aryans (like Poles and Jews) in general, and was ignited and strengthened through the fascist Nazi ideology.
They massacred innocent women and children.
Now, Bogdan, you can disagree with this analysis, you can say it is all lies, but THIS is the story that is told in "open sources" such as Wikipedia and general historical and reference sites.
AND YET, Ukrainians alone have the contrarian view - NOW - that the OUN-UPA were the good guys.
This is the point of my article.
Because I agree with you - especially when it comes to torture and the brutal murder of women and children, when you compare what the UPA did in Volhynia with what the Azovs did in Donbas, the "historical parallels" (as you call them) ARE INDEED STAGGERING.
