Kiev Former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko wants to boost the fighting spirit of the country’s soldiers with honey bars and nationalist logos.
“This is the honey loved by all, which comes from the hives of the homeland of great Ukrainians,” dpa news agency quoted 68-year-old as saying on a Facebook post.
In a first delivery, 25,000 packages bearing the effigies of national poet Taras Shevchenko and controversial Ukrainian nationalist and anti-Semite Stepan Bandera are to go to the front.
The honey comes from the birthplaces of Shevchenko and Bandera in the central Ukrainian region of Cherkasy and the western Ukrainian Ivano-Frankivsk.
“There is no common language with the Muscovites. And with honey as well,” it says on the package decorated with Bandera.
Bandera was the ideological leader of the radical wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).
Nationalist partisans from western Ukraine were responsible for ethnically motivated expulsions in 1943 in which tens of thousands of Polish civilians were murdered.
Bandera fled to Germany after World War II, where he was assassinated by an agent of the KGB Soviet secret service in 1959.
For the next series, Ukrainians should propose variants, Yushchenko demanded.
“We are really the strongest army in the world. Because power and strength of the army is measured not primarily by the number of tanks, but by the strength of spirit!” the politician wrote.
Yushchenko was president of Ukraine from 2005 to 2010.
He came to power via an extraordinary third round of elections forced by street protests in 2004.
After the first round of the 2010 presidential election, he awarded Bandera the title of “Hero of Ukraine”, even though he was never a Ukrainian citizen.
The decision was reversed by Yushchenko’s successor Viktor Yanukovych.
(IANS)
