Snip:

A street in Kiev has been renamed in honor of WWII Ukrainian militant Taras Borovets, as part of a nationalist push to glorify “outstanding figures of Ukraine” and erase Russian and Soviet history.

[...]

Taras ‘Bulba’ Borovets – nicknamed after the famous Cossack in Nikolay Gogol’s novel – was a Ukrainian nationalist in Volhynia, which was part of interwar Poland. In August 1941, following the Axis invasion of the USSR, he received permission from the Nazis to raise 1,000 men as the ‘Polissian Sich’ militia. This unit went on to aid the Germans in massacring the Jews of Zhitomir Region, most notably in the town of Olevsk.

The Germans later transferred Borovets and a unit of militants he led to the Western front, so they could escape justice and surrender to the Western Allies. Borovets himself apparently spent some time as a US intelligence asset in Germany, before moving to Canada, where he founded a nationalist newspaper. He died in Toronto in 1981 and was buried in New Jersey.

Borovets was honored as part of renaming 12 local streets and squares in Kiev. The Ukrainian capital has already renamed streets after the notorious neo-Nazi Azov unit, and earlier this year swapped Truth Boulevard for European Union Avenue.