I intend no defense of Bandera, who was an execrable fascist. But it's hard to collaborate in your jailer's Holocaust from a concentration camp or prison.

Rossolinski's book clearly mentions that the part of Ukraine ruled by the Austro-Hungarian empire did not force the Ukrainian language and culture underground, as did the Tsarist and Bolshevik regimes. From his book:

"Ukrainian nationalism thrived in eastern Galicia rather than in eastern Ukraine where the

activities of the Ukrainian nationalists were suppressed by the Russian Empire. The political

liberalism of the Habsburg Empire, as it developed after 1867, made Galician Ukrainians

more nationalist, populist, and mystical than eastern Ukrainians. During the second half of the

nineteenth century, the systematic policy of Russification in eastern Ukraine made the national

distinction between Ukrainians and Russians increasingly meaningless. Most eastern

Ukrainians understood Ukraine to be a region of Russia, and considered themselves to be a

people akin to Russians.[138]

Because of the nationalist discourse that took place in eastern Galicia, the province was

labeled as the Ukrainian “Piedmont.” Because of their loyalty to the Habsburg Empire,

Galician Ukrainians were known as the “Tyroleans of the East.” In Russian Ukraine, on the

other hand, the majority of the political and intellectual stratum assimilated into Russian

culture and did not pay attention to Ukrainian nationalism...."

"At the time of Bandera’s birth, close to 20 percent of “Ukrainians,” or people who began to

perceive themselves as Ukrainians as a result of the invention of Ukrainian national identity,

lived in the Habsburg Empire (in Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia). At the same time, 80

percent of Ukrainians lived in the Russian Empire (in eastern Ukraine, also known as “Russian

Ukraine”).[124] This division and other political, religious, and cultural differences caused

Galician Ukrainians to become a quite different people from the Ukrainians in Russian

Ukraine. The division posed a difficult challenge, both for activists of the moderate, socialistinfluenced, nineteenth-century national movement, such as Mykhailo Drahomanov (1841–

1895), Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi (1866–1934), and Ivan Franko (1856–1916), and later for the

extreme, violent, and revolutionary twentieth-century nationalists such as Dmytro Dontsov

(1883–1973), Ievhen Konovalets’ (1891–1938), and Stepan

Bandera (1909–1959). These political figures tried to establish a single Ukrainian nation that

would live in one Ukrainian state.[125]

To some extent, the dual and heterogeneous state of affairs was a continuation of earlier premodern political and cultural divisions of the territories that the Ukrainian national movement

claimed as its own. In the twentieth century, the East-West division and the separate

development of the two Ukrainian identities did not narrow and, due to new geopolitical

circumstances, even widened."