Banderite

[5][6][7] Because of the brutality utilized by OUN-B members, the colloquial term Banderites quickly earned a negative connotation, particularly among Poles and Jews.

[citation needed] During his five years in prison, Bandera was "to some extent detached from OUN discourses" but not completely isolated from the global political debates of the late 1930s thanks to Ukrainian and other newspaper subscriptions delivered to his cell.

This led to the split of the OUN in the spring of 1941 into two groups: OUN-B (Banderites), who were more militant, younger and supported Bandera, and OUN-M (Melnykites), who were generally older and more ideological.

[1] After the start of the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 (Operation Barbarossa), the OUN-B in the person of Yaroslav Stetsko declared an independent Ukrainian state on 30 June 1941 in occupied Lviv, while the region was under the control of Nazi Germany,[17] pledging to work closely with Germany, which was presented as freeing Ukrainians from Russian oppression.

[2][1] To ensure the maximum impact of the systematic ethnic cleansing campaign in the contested territory, the OUN-B faction spread antisemitic, racist, and fascist propaganda among the ordinary peasants and other Ukrainians.

The manifesto informed the locals how to behave and included specific instructions about the killing of Jews, Poles, and Ukrainian opponents of fascism.

[2]: 237  The most deadly of them was perpetrated in the city of Lviv by the people's militia formed by OUN at the moment of the German arrival in the Soviet-occupied eastern Poland.

According to Richard Breitman and Norman Goda in Hitler's Shadow, Bandera and Stetsko refused to do this, and in December 1944 they fled Berlin, heading south.

"[12] The term has been used by Russian state media against Euromaidan activists to associate a separate Ukrainian national identity with the most radical nationalists.

[13][25][12] Today, in Russian propaganda, the word is used to refer to all in Ukraine who back the idea of sovereignty from Russia; Ukrainian nationalist collaboration with Nazi Germany is also emphasized.