CZECH President Milos Zeman has slammed the Ukrainian government and the European Union for their refusal to condemn a march in Kiev glorifying fascist war criminal Stepan Bandera.

The Social Democratic Party leader said on Sunday that the chilling slogans and a flagrant display of far-right symbols during the march on Thursday reminded him of Hitler’s Germany.

He insisted that something was wrong both with Ukraine and the EU.

“I was browsing the internet yesterday evening and discovered a video showing the demonstration on Kiev’s Maidan on January 1,” he said.

“These demonstrators carried portraits of Stepan Bandera, which reminded me of Reinhard Heydrich,” a major architect of the Holocaust and nazi administrator of much of the modern Czech Republic.

“The parade itself was organised similar to nazi torchlight parades, where participants shouted the slogan: ‘Death to the Poles, Jews and communists without mercy’,” Mr Zeman explained.

Stepan Bandera headed the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, which collaborated with nazi Germany and was involved in ethnic cleansing of Poles, Jews and Russians.

Thursday’s marchers chanted “Glory to the nation! Death to our enemies,” “Ukraine belongs to Ukrainians” and “Bandera will return and restore order.”

Some participants wore the uniforms of the Bandera insurgent army while others paraded with red and black nationalist flags.

Leader Oleh Tyanhybok of the fascist party Svoboda (Freedom), which organised the march with the like-minded Right Sector, said before the march began: “The current government came to power using Bandera’s slogans, so it has to follow his ideas.”

But Jewish rights group the Simon Wiesenthal Centre Jerusalem bureau director Dr Efraim Zuroff said: “Holocaust perpetrators are the last people on Earth who deserve to be glorified, regardless of their nationalist credentials.

“The march has more to do with the systematic Holocaust distortion prevalent in post-communist eastern Europe, which has a very fundamental anti-semitic component, than outright anti-semitism.

“The march is a good example of three separate phenomena — hiding or minimising the role of local nazi collaborators in Holocaust crimes, promoting the canard of equivalency between nazi and communist crimes and glorification of anti-communist freedom fighters who were local nazi collaborators who participated in Shoah [Holocaust] crimes.”