Ivan Babii

Ivan Babij (March 5, 1893 in the village of Dobromirka – July 25, 1934 in Lwów) was a Ukrainian educator from Eastern Galicia, captain of the Ukrainian Galician Army, principal of a Ukrainian high school in Lwów, and activist of the Ukrainian Catholic Action.

Ivan Babij

Babij graduated from a high school in Tarnopol, then studied classical philology at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów. Following the start of World War I in 1914 he was called into the Austro-Hungarian Army, where he served in the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen. In 1918-1919 he fought against Poland in the Ukrainian Galician Army and in 1920 participated as an officer of the Ukrainian People's Army in the Kyiv Offensive of the joint Polish-Ukrainian forces.

Later, he became a principal of a high school in Brzeżany, then, in 1931, took the post of principal of a Ukrainian high school in Lwów. He organized the Youth for Christ festival in western Ukraine.[1] Babij openly criticized the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which resulted in death sentence, passed by the Revolutionary Tribunal of the OUN. He was murdered by OUN's activist Mykhaylo Car.[2] The assassination was publicly condemned by the Ukrainian Archbishop Andrey Sheptytsky.

The revolutionary tribunal of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists sentenced him to death. In this regard, on July 27, 1934, an OUN militant killed Babiy in Lviv. As it turned out, Babiy was assigned police protection, and when the attacker realized that he would not be able to escape, he tried to shoot himself. In the hospital, the militant regained consciousness and confessed that he was a member of the OUN and his name was Mykhailo Tsar, originally from Pozdymyr. On August 17, the killer died of his wound.[3]