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Yevhen Konovalets (1891-1938) was a military commander of the UNR army and political leader of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. He is best known as the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists between 1929 and 1938.

Konovalets was born June 14, 1891 in the village of Zashkiv near Lviv in Austro-Hungarian Galicia (now Ukraine). Early in his youth he joined the University of Lviv and graduated from law faculty. He was also an active member of an Ukrainian educative association Prosvita and a representative in the Executive Committee of the National-Democratic Party.

He served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War in the rank of a Second Lieutenant. However, in 1915 he was taken prisoner of war by the Russians and interned near Tsaritsyn. While in captivity he joined a group of former Galician officers (with Andrii Melnyk among others) which altogether fled to Kiev in November 1917 to organize there a Galician-Bukovynian Battalion of the Sich Riflemen. Two months later he assumed its command and helped suppress the Kiev Bolshevik uprising as well as resisting the Antonov-Ovseenko's offensive.

In 1920, in reaction to shattered struggle for Ukrainian independence, Konovalets set up to create a new organization capable of acting in underground conditions within the borders of the new "occupying powers", i.e. Poland, Bolshevik Russia, Romania and Czechoslovakia. Created in August of that year in Prague, the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO) was aimed at armed resistance against Poland and Russia, as well as military training of youth and prevention of any forms of cooperation between Ukrainians and Polish authorities. Instead, the UVO supported the idea of Ukrainian-German alliance that was to prepare the ground for the future independence of Ukraine. After the end of the Polish-Bolshevik War and the fights for Lwów, Konovalets became the leader of UVO in the city. However, after several acts of sabotage his organisation was broken by the police and in December Konovalets himself had to flee the country.

During his exile years he lived in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. In 1929 he took part in the first congress of Ukrainian nationalists in Vienna where the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was born with Konovalets as its leader. Konovalets then actively promoted its influence among the Ukrainian emigres throughout Europe while establishing contacts with intelligence offices of Lithuania, Germany and Italy. The goal of the OUN was to revive an independent Ukraine through armed struggle. After Adolf Hitler's rise it turned its attention to Germany and hoped for a future European war which would lead to a change of power constellation in the East. Meanwhile the OUN launched a terrorist and subversive campaign in pre-war Poland while acting also in the other three states with Ukrainian minorities.

Konovalets' activities raised fear in Kremlin because of penetration of the OUN into the Soviet Union. On May 23, 1938 he was killed by a booby-trap masked as a "present" from his "true friend" who turned out to be the NKVD agent Pavel Sudoplatov in Rotterdam.

In late 2006 the Lviv city administration announced the future transference of the tombs of Yevhen Konovalets, Stepan Bandera, Andriy Melnyk and other key leaders of OUN/UPA to a new area of Lychakivskiy Cemetery specifically dedicated to Ukrainian national liberation struggle.[1]

• Volodymyr Kubijovyč, Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1984 - 2001.
• encyclopediaofukraine.com
• Dovidnyk z istorii Ukrainy, Kyiv: Heneza 2002.
• Vladislav Moulis, Běsové ruské revoluce, Praha: Dokořán, 2002.