The bronze[5] bust is located on private property[6] near the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex in Edmonton.[7] It was partly funded by Canadian taxpayers.[5]
The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies called for the removal of the bust in 2021, stating that the bust and another local sculpture honours "Nazi collaborators and war criminals".[11] Jewish group B'nai Brith also called for the bust's removal.[11]
The bust was vandalised with the word "Nazi scum" in 2019.[8] The sculpture was again dubbed with graffiti in 2021 with the words "Actual Nazi" written in red paint.[7] In reaction to the second vandalism, the Ukrainian Youth Association issued as statement, calling the accusations that Ukrainian nationalist fighters during the Second World War were Nazis "Communist propaganda".[12]
In October 2022, journalist and activist Duncan Kinney was charged with graffiti related to vandalism.[7]
^Anton Shekhovtsov (2011). "The Creeping Resurgence of the Ukrainian Radical Right? The Case of the Freedom Party" Europe-Asia Studies 63:2, pp. 203–228. doi:10.1080/09668136.2011.547696. "Although originally the UVO was seen as both a military and a political organisation, its military actions were mostly terrorist, while its political activities failed altogether."
^McBride, Jared (Fall 2016). "Peasants into Perpetrators: The OUN-UPA and the Ethnic Cleansing of Volhynia, 1943–1944". Slavic Review. 75 (3): 630–654. doi:10.5612/slavicreview.75.3.0630. S2CID165089612. The OUN-UPA-planned ethnic cleansing continued unabated throughout summer 1943. The crescendo came on the night of July 11–12, 1943 when the UPA planned a highly coordinated attack (known among Poles as the 'Peter and Paul action' for the holiday on which it occurred) against Polish villages in three raions: Kovel', Khorokhiv, and Volodymyr-Volyns'kyi. Over one hundred localities were targeted in this action, and some 4,000 Poles were murdered. Finally, the last wave of attacks came in December 1943 before Shukhevych decided to move the cleansing operations to Galicia where tens of thousands more Galician Poles were murdered. Following the killings in Volhynia, the UPA-North group gave the order to 'destroy all traces of the Poles' by 'destroying all Polish churches and all other Polish places of worship'.