Andriy Atanasovych Melnyk (; 12 December 1890 – 1 November 1964) was a Ukrainian military and political leader best known for leading the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists from 1938 onwards and later the Melnykites (OUN-M) following a split with the more radical Banderite faction (OUN-B) in 1940.
Born in Austrian Galicia, Melnyk volunteered in the Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen at the outbreak of the First World War and was later captured by the Russians in 1916. He escaped captivity in late 1917 and served as a senior officer in the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic during the Ukrainian War of Independence, rising to the rank of colonel. Melnyk went on to cofound the Ukrainian Military Organisation (UVO) in 1920 that continued the armed struggle against Poland in Western Ukraine and which later formed the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in 1929. Following his time in prison between 1924 and 1928 in connection with the Olha Basarab case, he largely stepped back from active engagement in the UVO–OUN underground.
After the assassination of Yevhen Konovalets by the NKVD, Melnyk was selected to lead the OUN and collaborated with Nazi intelligence to plan the largely aborted OUN Uprising of 1939 during the German invasion of Poland. Following the factional split, he continued to direct the OUN-M to collaborate with Nazi Germany during the German invasion of the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front. However, Melnyk had his movements confined to Berlin from mid-1941, though he would continue to advocate collaboration, and was arrested by the Gestapo in January 1944. He was initially held as a in Hirschegg from March, before being moved to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in July.
Melnyk was released in October and taken to Berlin in order to negotiate support for the retreating German Army, assuming a leading role in brokering a common stance between a broad spectrum of Ukrainian nationalist groups represented under the Ukrainian National Committee. However, with the war nearing its end and Nazi officials still rejecting demands for the recognition of an independent Ukrainian state, Melnyk and his supporters withdrew from the committee and travelled west in early 1945 to meet the Allied advance.
Melnyk continued to lead the OUN-M in exile until his death in 1964 and lobbied for the consolidation of Ukrainian diaspora organisations, with the World Congress of Free Ukrainians founded in 1967. In May 2026, the Ukrainian government organised the transfer of Melnyk and his wife Sofia's remains from Luxembourg to Ukraine, whereafter they were reburied with state honours in the National Military Memorial Cemetery, near Kyiv.
Early life and education Andriy Atanasovych Melnyk was born in Volya Yakubov, a village near Drohobych, Galicia, to Maria Kovaliv (d.1894/7) and Atanas Melnyk (d.1905), a public figure who at a relatively young age became village head and set up a local branch of the Prosvita society. Melnyk graduated from a gymnasium in Stryi in 1910.
Both his parents died prematurely of tuberculosis, leaving him to be raised by his remarried father's widow, Pavlyna Matchak, who paid for two surgeries relating to his own struggle with the disease between 1910 and 1912, removing two ribs. Note: the head of the Department for Ethno-Political Studies at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and not the politician. Between 1912 and 1914 he studied forestry at the Higher School of Agriculture in Vienna, though his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War.
First World War (1914–1917)
In 1914, Melnyk volunteered in the newly formed Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen (USS) where he commanded a company that was engaged in sabotage, rising from a khorunzhyi to the rank of lieutenant. He later fought in the Battle of Makivka and received the silver Signum Laudis medal in late 1915 during an awards ceremony by Archduke Karl.
He was reportedly referred to as "Lord Melnyk" by his fellow Ukrainian and Austrian officers who felt that he embodied the English concept of a gentleman, which at that time had been an ideal in Central Europe. In early September 1916, Melnyk was wounded and taken prisoner by the Russians during the Battle on Mount Lysonia alongside several hundred USS soldiers.
Captivity Melnyk and his comrades in the USS (including Roman Sushko and ) were transferred between several prisoner-of-war camps, including briefly one in Tsaritsyn, before they were moved to a lightly guarded internment camp in the village of Dubovka as of March 1917. Melnyk became a close associate of Yevhen Konovalets, a Ukrainian second lieutenant captured in 1915 who was held in the Tsaritsyn camp and from whom Melnyk learned of the developments in Ukraine surrounding the February Revolution and the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II.
The Central Rada was initially reluctant to form a regular army and, out of fear of being accused of Austrophilism, refused to accept former members of the Austro-Hungarian army from Galicia into the first Ukrainised regiments.
Melnyk worked with his fellow USS officers in the internment camp to organise a system of lecture courses for their fellow prisoners-of-war on political economy, the history and geography of Ukraine, and military affairs in preparation for joining the Ukrainian War of Independence. Former Austrian soldiers were later permitted into Ukrainian ranks and Konovalets, who was working to organise a military unit, sent word to the Dubovka camp. Melnyk and his fellow officers made their escape in late December 1917, joining Konovalets in Kyiv in early January 1918 in the early stages of the Russian Civil War.
Ukrainian War of Independence (1918–1920)
On arriving in Kyiv, Melnyk assumed the position of chief of staff in the Galician-Bukovinian Kurin of the Sich Riflemen, commanded by Konovalets, under the Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR). Amid a lack of coordination among nationalist forces, Konovalets and Melnyk developed an operation plan to quell the 1918 Kyiv Arsenal January Uprising in which the Sich Riflemen distinguished themselves and played a key role in liberating the city. Melnyk held the position of otaman in the Ukrainian People's Army (UNA) and in recognition of his contribution was conferred the rank of major as of March and later the rank of colonel. Kyiv was captured in February by the Bolsheviks, themselves dislocated by the German army in March following the collapse of the frontlines and aided by the Sich Riflemen per the Bread Peace.
Dissatisfied with disruption caused by the socialist agrarian reforms of the Central Rada, the German military authorities supported a coup d'état in April and installed the Ukrainian State in its place. Melnyk accompanied Konovalets to a meeting with Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi on 29 April, with the Sich Riflemen forced to disband on 1 May after refusing to recognise Skoropadskyi's authority. Alongside Konovalets and other senior officers, Melnyk met with Skoropadskyi in late July and was part of a delegation on 31 August that swore an oath of allegiance to the Hetman in return for the reinstatement of the Sich Riflemen. He subsequently participated in the formation of a new Sich Riflemen unit in Bila Tserkva under the authority of the Hetman.
Melnyk and Fedir Chernyk travelled to Kyiv on 30 October to meet with representatives of the socialist Ukrainian National Union, including Volodymyr Vynnychenko and Yuriy Tyutyunnyk, for preliminary discussions about an uprising against the Hetmanate. The Sich Riflemen subsequently supported Symon Petliura's Directorate in the November 1918 Anti-Hetman Uprising, incited by a proposed federal union with White Russia. With the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that same month, the Polish-Ukrainian War simultaneously broke out for control of Western Ukraine. Hetman Skoropadskyi was successfully ousted and the UPR re-established in Kyiv in December. Amid the intensification of anti-Jewish pogroms in January 1919, Melnyk, briefly acting as commander of the Siege Corps, issued an order to court-martial and administer the "most severe punishment" to anyone caught agitating for or spreading rumours about the possibility of pogroms. (English subtitles) A January decree from Petliura to stem the violence was ineffectual and failed to restore discipline among UNA troops. Melnyk attended a conference in Kyiv on 16 January as a representative of the Rifle Council, alongside other pro-independence parties. At the conference, the Riflemen put forward a proposal to reform the government into a temporary triumvirate military dictatorship consisting of Petliura, Konovalets, and Melnyk on the basis that it would enable them to better meet the demands of the state-building process, though this was rejected by the other parties present including Petliura and the Directorate. Melnyk assumed the position of chief of staff of the wider UNA from March to June and assistant commandant of the Sich Riflemen from July to August.
Following the fall of Kyiv and amid a bleak strategic position, the regular army was dissolved in December 1919 upon the switch to partisan warfare. That month, Melnyk fell ill from a typhus epidemic; soon after he was captured by Polish troops at a train station and taken to a hospital in Rivne. He recovered and was released in January 1920 during negotiations pertaining to the Treaty of Warsaw that would in April cede most of Western Ukraine to Poland in return for an alliance and Polish recognition of the UPR. Travelling from Warsaw in February, Melnyk delivered funds to improve the living conditions of Sich Riflemen who were interned by the Poles in Rivne and Lutsk. In March, Melnyk was appointed military attaché of the UNA in Czechoslovakia, based in Prague, intending to assist Konovalets in setting up a new unit to aid the Kyiv offensive from ZUNR soldiers interned in Jablonné v Podještědí and Ukrainian prisoners-of-war in Europe. However this failed to materialise due to discontent among West Ukrainians and members of the Ukrainian Galician Army and became irrelevant with the subsequent collapse of the Polish-Ukrainian lines.
Following a Red Army counteroffensive and the Battle of Warsaw in August, the conflict culminated in the 1921 Peace of Riga that partitioned Ukrainian territory, placing much of Ukraine in the hands of the Bolsheviks, who would go on to effectively repress Ukrainian nationalist and cultural movements, and the west under Polish control, with Transcarpathia and Bukovina annexed by Czechoslovakia and Romania respectively.
Interwar political activities (1920–1938)
Alongside Konovalets and former Sich Riflemen in August 1920, Melnyk was a founding member of the Ukrainian Military Organisation (UVO), an underground militant group that continued the armed struggle against Poland and engaged in acts of terrorism and assassinations. Having completed his forestry studies in Prague and Vienna, Melnyk moved to Lviv in September 1922 upon which he was briefly arrested. Melnyk assumed the position of head of the UVO Home Command in early 1923 and set about rebuilding its base into a conspiratorial underground. In April 1924, he was arrested in connection to the Olha Basarab case and imprisoned in Lviv for intelligence activities against the Polish state.