A MORE FRUITFUL APPROACH WOULD BE TO DISCUSS THE STORY OPENLY.

nationalist who collaborated with the Nazis for a period, play big in the Russian press. So do stories featuring the Azov Regiment of the Ukrainian National Guard, staffed with ultranationalists and using a Nazi symbol on its emblem.

Like Poland, Russia has noted a Ukrainian law bestowing hero status on the 1940s nationalist organizations that worked closely with the Nazis and are known to have unleashed genocide on Poles and Jews.

For Russians, their country’s role in the Nazis’ defeat has long been the cornerstone of national pride. For more than seven decades, World War II history has been taught in schools in an uncompromising, back-and-white light.

Nazi collaborators are still seen as the ultimate criminals, regardless of their motives. It’s not a nuanced view. So Freeland’s dismissive attitude about her grandfather’s past will inevitably be taken as evidence that she, too, would have worked with the Nazis if they were active today — and that explains her support for the current Ukrainian government.

One way to deal with that is to dodge the issue as Freeland did, saying, in effect, that if certain information is being spread by Kremlin-friendly outlets, it’s not worthy of attention. That doesn’t tend to help matters.

A more fruitful approach would be to discuss the story openly and without reservation, as John-Paul Himka, a retired history professor at the University of Alberta and Freeland’s uncle, did in his academic work.

He did his best to remain objective as he unpicked the ethnic resentments that ran wild in 1940s Ukraine. He didn’t pretend that a richer context exculpated the Nazi collaborators. Understanding that context, however, de-mythologizes World War II; that’s necessary to finally lay it to rest.

Freeland can’t be responsible for her grandfather. There would be no dishonour for her in talking about his role in the Nazi propaganda effort and the compromises Ukrainian nationalists made with Nazis at the time.

The history of Ukrainian nationalism is hardly rosy. Today’s Ukrainian leaders attempt to fashion it into a heroic past in much the same way as Putin’s Russia continues the Soviet tradition of ignoring the Stalin-era crimes that helped the Bloodlands earn that name. It’s conceivable that the grandfathers of the Russians now accusing Freeland of going too easy on her ancestors committed far more serious crimes than newspaperman Michael Chomiak.

Unlike Russia and Ukraine, however, Canada should have no propaganda axe to grind.

It’s the West’s role to talk honestly about an era that is gone and a war that has long been over. That might help prompt a reassessment of the current official version of history in Ukraine, which could only be beneficial for Ukraine’s budding European identity.

Depoliticizing discussion of World War II may eventually mean Russians, too, will start questioning their self-righteousness — a necessary condition for a less aggressive foreign policy stance.