The Roland Battalion (), officially known as Special Group Roland, was a subunit under the command of the German military intelligence agency's (the Abwehr's) special operations unit Lehrregiment "Brandenburg" z.b.V. 800 in 1941. It and the Nachtigall Battalion were the two military units set up following the 25 February 1941 decision by the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Franz Canaris, who sanctioned the recruitment of a "" () under German command. The Roland Battallion, formed in mid-April 1941, 350-strong and initially based in the Ostmark (present-day Austria), was composed primarily of volunteers of Ukrainian ethnicity living in German-occupied Poland and directed to the unit by orders of Bandera's Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). In Germany, in November 1941 the Ukrainian personnel of the Legion (Nachtigall and Roland battallions) was reorganized into Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201. It numbered 650 persons, who served for a year in the occupied Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (present-day Belarus) before disbanding. Formation Prior to Operation Barbarossa, both Stepan Bandera and Andriy Melnyk, who led rival branches of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists actively cooperated with Nazi Germany. According to the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and other sources, Bandera held meetings with the heads of Germany's intelligence, regarding the formation of the Nachtigall and Roland Battalions. On 25 February 1941, the head of the Abwehr, Wilhelm Franz Canaris, sanctioned the creation of the "Ukrainian Legion" under German command. The unit would have had 800 persons. Roman Shukhevych became a commander of the Legion from the OUN-B side. OUN expected that the unit would become the core of the future Ukrainian army. In the spring the OUN received 2.5 million marks for subversive activities against the USSR. In the spring of 1941 the Legion was reorganized into 2 units. One of the units became known as Nachtigall Battalion, a second became the Roland Battalion, and the remainder was immediately dispatched into Soviet Union to sabotage the Red Army's rear. The Battalion was set up by the Abwehr and organized by Richard Yary of the OUN(b) in March 1941, prior to the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Approximately 350 Bandera's OUN followers were trained at the Abwehr training centre at the Seibersdorf under the command of the former Polish Army major and OUN member Yevhen Pobihushchyi. In comparison to Nachtigall, which used ordinary Wehrmacht uniform, the Roland Battalion was outfitted in the Czech uniform with yellow