Andriy Melnyk

…We never thought that the victory of the Ukrainian cause would be easy. We did not wait idly for someone else, an outsider, to choose Ukraine’s freedom for us. We know that the Ukrainian State will not be the result of mere happy circumstances but that it will be built primarily by Ukrainian hands…

Andriy Melnyk

Andriy Melnyk was a Colonel of the Ukrainian People’s Republic Army, the second leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) (1938–1964), and a fighter for Ukraine’s independence.

He was born on December 12, 1890, in Volya Yakubova, in the Lviv region. His father, Atanas Melnyk, was a literate person who worked on his farm. Andriy studied in the schools of Sambir and Drohobych, later in the Stryi gymnasium, and the Higher School of Agriculture in Vienna. As a child, he suffered from tuberculosis and underwent two surgeries.

At the beginning of World War I, he volunteered to join the Legion of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen ranks, fighting on the Austro-Russian front as a corporal and lieutenant. During the battles for the mountain of Lysonia, he was wounded and captured by the Russian forces. He spent a year and a half in prisoner-of-war camps, including Tsaritsyn (now Volgograd), from where he escaped together with other members of the Legion of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen at the beginning of 1918.

Melnyk was one of the leaders of the liberation struggles. During 1918–1921, he served as a kurin commander, regiment officer, chief of staff of the corps, division commander, and assistant commander of the corps of Sich Riflemen. Melnyk distinguished himself during the suppression of the Bolshevik uprising in Kyiv (January–February 1918) and the anti-Hetman uprising. From January 1919, he was the chief of staff of the Army of the Ukrainian National Republic. In December 1919, he was captured by the Poles and sent to an internment camp.

In 1920, along with Yevhen Konovalets and other senior officers, he co-founded the Ukrainian Military Organization (Ukrainska viiskova orhanizatsiia—UVO), an underground organization of veterans of Ukrainian military formations aimed to continue the armed struggle for Ukraine’s independence. In 1924, he was arrested by the Polish police, together with other UVO members, and soon sentenced to five years in prison.

After his release, Melnyk continued public and underground activities. In 1929, he created the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), formed by merging UMO and student nationalist associations.

After the assassination of Yevhen Konovalets in May 1938, Melnyk headed the Provid (Leadership) of Ukrainian Nationalists. On May 23, 1939, his position was formally ratified on the Second Great Assembly of Ukrainian Nationalists in Rome. Due to a split in the OUN in early 1940 caused by tactical, ideological, and personal differences, he led the more moderate wing of the organization, known as OUN(m).

With the beginning of the German-Soviet war, he managed the OUN (m) activities in Ukrainian territories. From the end of July 1941, he was kept under house arrest by the Germans until he was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1944.
In the post-war years, he lived in Luxembourg. In 1947, the Third Great Assembly of OUN elected Andriy Melnyk as the lifetime Chairman of the OUN.

He created the Ukrainian National Council to unite representatives of various political parties and movements in the Ukrainian diaspora. In 1957, he proposed the idea of the World Congress of Ukrainians.

He died on November 1, 1964, in a hospital in Cologne (Germany). He was buried, according to his will, next to the grave of his wife, Sofia Fedak, at the Bonnvoie cemetery in Luxembourg.