Trudeau’s deputy prime minister caught holding flag of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators who massacred Poles
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Some are asking why Chrystia Freeland wouldn’t know better than to hold the flag of a Ukrainian group condemned for engaging in mass murder.
(LifeSiteNews) — Justin Trudeau’s Deputy Prime Minister was photographed Sunday helping to hold the banner of a Ukrainian nationalist army that collaborated with the Nazis and violently massacred tens of thousands of Poles as part of an ethnic cleansing program.
On Monday morning, Chrystia Freeland, the Ukrainian-descended Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance of Canada, tweeted a picture of herself at Sunday’s “Mega March for Ukraine” in Toronto helping to hold a banner reading “Glory to Ukraine” in the red and black battle flag colors of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)
Later that morning, she retweeted the same message but swapped out the photo of herself holding the UPA banner with one taken with the same people, but this time without the UPA banner. She has not issued an explanation for the photo swap.
The UPA was a Ukrainian paramilitary group active during World War II, which was founded by the Organization of Ukrainian nationalists (OUA). The UPA army was politically led by the extremist faction of the OUA, in turn led by Stepan Bandera, who is hailed in some parts of the Ukraine as a hero but in other parts is more widely considered a terrorist.
Under Bandera, the UPA carried out massacres of Poles from 1943 to 1945, in line with the OUN’s goal of establishing a Nazi Germany-allied, mono-ethnic Ukrainian state on territory including parts of modern-day Russia, Poland, and Belarus.