Take the case of Stepan Bandera, for whom there are streets named in Kyiv and Lviv. For most Russians, “Banderovite” (often rendered as “Banderite” in English) is still synonymous, as it was in Soviet rhetoric, with “fascist thug”—so the celebration of Bandera feeds right into the “Ukrainian Nazis” trope. For many Ukrainians, it’s a much more complicated story. They point out that Bandera, the head of the political wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), was arrested by the Nazis in July 1941, shortly after the German invasion of the USSR, for advocating Ukrainian independence; he was held in a concentration camp in solitary confinement until September 1944, when things were going so badly for the Germans on the Eastern front that they were trying to recruit help anywhere they could. His two brothers died in Auschwitz. (The victim narratives usually leave out the fact that Bandera had worked with German military intelligence before the invasion.)
The OUN and its military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), saw fighting the Soviets as its primary mission during the Soviet-German war; while formally opposed to German occupation of Ukraine and outlawed by the occupation authorities, it often existed in an informal truce with German forces. At times, however, UPA fighters battled the Germans and even formed alliances with Soviet partisans. The question of whether they were accomplices to the Holocaust is also factually messy and contentious. Ukrainian historians and journalists sympathetic to the nationalist cause have sometimes depicted the OUN/UPA as a practically Jewish-friendly organization, cherry-picking the historical record to point to reports that it had Jewish members and in some instances rescued Jews from the Nazis.