Ukraine's State Film Agency announced the completion of the full-length feature film «Slava» directed by Denys Soboliev. The creative team has already presented the official poster. The exact release date has not yet been announced — the team announced a "countdown."
What the film reconstructs
The events of the film unfold in 1962 in the German city of Karlsruhe. In the dock is Bohdan Stashynsky, a KGB agent and native of Lviv region, recruited by Soviet secret services in his youth after a chance detention: the choice was simple then — prison or cooperation.
By 1959, he had managed to kill two people. In 1957 — publicist and OUN activist Lev Rebet in Munich, in 1959 — OUN leader Stepan Bandera in the same city. Both times he used a special KGB weapon: a metal cylinder charged with cyanide gas that was sprayed in the victim's face and imitated a heart attack — without visible signs of violence. The device was specifically designed to make the murder look like natural death.
«This dramatic story is a mirror of our present day: the world changes, but the enemy and his cynical methods remain unchanged».
— Creative team of the film «Slava»
The scheme revealed by the court
Stashynsky acted on the direct orders of then-KGB chief Alexander Shelepin. After "successfully" completing his tasks, he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner in the USSR. The truth came out only in 1961: after the death of his newborn child, Stashynsky was given permission to travel to East Berlin — and three hours before the construction of the Berlin Wall began, he fled with his wife to the West, where he surrendered to police and confessed to two murders.
At the trial in Karlsruhe, the court made a precedent-setting conclusion on October 16, 1962: the true criminal is not the executor, but the state that ordered the killing. Stashynsky received only 8 years in prison — and that for a double murder. OUN activist Yaroslav Stetsko, present at the trial, accused Nikita Khrushchev personally and called for the case to be referred to an international tribunal. This did not happen.
In parallel with the film «Slava», the State Film Agency signed another contract in late 2024 on the Stashynsky theme: the film company «Hansafilm» received almost 24 million hryvnias for a separate project — «Why I Killed Bandera» directed by Taras Rybalchenko. Both films cover the same events, but from different angles.
Why this is not just «historical cinema»
The scheme used by the KGB in 1957–1959 — a weapon without traces, a legend about natural death, an executor with impeccable documents — remained the standard for Soviet and post-Soviet special operations. The cases of Skripal, Litvinenko, and Gongadze fit into the same logic: the state orders, the executor bears minimal responsibility, the customers remain beyond the reach of the court.
- Stashynsky killed Bandera with poisonous cyanide gas — the death looked like a heart attack
- The court convicted the USSR as the organizer, but no Soviet official bore personal responsibility
- Stashynsky himself was released well before his sentence was served — his subsequent fate remains unknown to this day
- The 1962 precedent — the first case in world practice when a court formally recognized the state as the customer of a political assassination
The question that the film «Slava» raises by the mere fact of its appearance in 2025: can feature film do what the international tribunal did not do in 1962 — establish the institutional responsibility of the state-murderer in such a way that it remains in cultural memory, not in archived files? The answer depends on whether the film reaches the international market — and whether it finds an audience beyond the Ukrainian diaspora.
