Melnykites

Melnykites (Ukrainian: Мельниківці, romanized: Melnykivtsi) is a colloquial name for members of the OUN-M or OUN(m), a faction of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) that arose out of a split with the more radical Banderite faction in 1940. The term derives from the name of Andriy Melnyk (1890–1964), the leader of the OUN formally elected to the post in August 1939 following the May 1938 assassination of the previous leader, Yevhen Konovalets, by the NKVD. Following the release of OUN members from Polish prisons in 1939, Stepan Bandera and his followers rejected Melnyk's leadership due to disagreements around the composition of the OUN leadership and Bandera's intention to provoke an uprising in Soviet-controlled Galicia. The factional split became more embittered in the lead up to the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The OUN(m) collaborated with Nazi Germany for much of the Second World War on the Eastern Front, contributing to the formation of various collaborationist units over the course of the conflict. The OUN(m) despatched expeditionary groups to shadow the Wehrmacht's advance into the Soviet Union and set up local administrations in occupied-Ukraine, though from November 1941 onwards its members were subjected to violent crackdowns by the German authorities. The Bukovinian OUN(m) initially carried out anti-Jewish pogroms in surrounding villages and, as members of Ukrainian Auxiliary Police units, many Melnykites were complicit in the implementation of the Holocaust in Ukraine. From October 1942, the OUN(m) and local Melnykites set up partisan units that competed for influence with Banderite, Polish, and Soviet partisan groups, while some OUN(m) partisans independently resisted the German occupation and participated to a peripheral extent in the massacres of the Polish population of Volhynia in 1943. Almost all of them were forcibly disarmed or merged into the Banderite Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) by the autumn...