Yevhen Mykhailovych Konovalets (14 June 1891-23 May 1938) was a Ukrainian nationalist leader who served as a commander of the Ukrainian National Republic and as leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists from 1929 to 1938, preceding Andriy Melnyk.
Biography[]
Yevhen Mykhailovych Konovalets was born in Zashkiv, Eastern Galicia, Austria-Hungary on 14 June 1891, and he became a nationalist activist during the 1910s, demanding that Ukrainians be granted their own university in Lviv. He became a member of the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance executive committee and a leader of the local student movement in Lviv in 1913, and he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I. He rose to the rank of lieutenant and was captured by the Imperial Russian Army in 1915, and he escaped from captivity a year later and took command of a unit of Sich Riflemen at the start of the Ukrainian War of Independence. He helped suppress the January 1918 Kiev Arsenal January Uprising and resisted a Bolshevik offensive, and, in March 1918, he liberated Kyiv from the communists. In May 1918, his military unit was disbanded due to its political views, but, on Pavlo Skoropadsky's rise to power, Konovalets rose in the rank of the Ukrainian National Army and was captured by the Polish Army in 1919. He was released in 1920 and moved to Czechoslovakia, creating the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO) in Prague, and training the youths to fight against Soviet Russia and Poland. He became the leader of the UVO in Lviv, but, in December 1922, he fled the country after the Poles cracked down on his organization. In 1929, he cofounded the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in Vienna, establishing contacts with the intelligence offices of Lithuania, Germany, Italy, and Britain. On 23 May 1938, an NKVD infiltrator within the OUN killed Konovalets in Rotterdam, Netherlands with a bomb hidden in a chocolate box.