The awarding of the honorary designation “Heroes of the UPA” to a unit of the Armed Forces of Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces became the foundation for an escalation of relations between Ukraine and Poland. Claims and demands directed at Ukraine have been voiced by top officials and politicians for more than a month now — even by some Ukrainians considered friendly toward our state. The peak came when the current President and two former Presidents of Ukraine returned their Orders of the White Eagle — Poland’s highest state award. The European Parliament also drew attention to the standoff: in a resolution dated July 8, it expressed regret that, in adopting the decision to name the military unit, Ukraine “did not take into account the feelings and grief of the Polish side.”
For many Ukrainians, Warsaw’s reaction came as an unpleasant surprise. After all, honoring the UPA and other fighters for independence in Ukraine carries no anti-Polish subtext. The attitude of the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians toward Poles has been positive over the past decades — and improved even further during the full-scale war, given the support and assistance from the Polish people and state.
However, in the collective memory of Poles, perception of the UPA and OUN exists almost exclusively within the framework of the narrative of the “Volyn massacre.” And political assessments of the events of the 1940s are enshrined at the legislative level. The Center for Strategic Communications has broken down 10 key components of this narrative.
1. The basis of the conflict was the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism as a Ukrainian version of fascism or Nazism
This narrative is far from the truth in many respects. In actuality, the Polish-Ukrainian confrontation during World War II is a continuation of the conflict between the Ukrainian and Polish state-building projects. The conflict flared up during the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires at the end of World War I. Both projects regarded Western Ukraine as an integral part of the Ukrainian and Polish states. As a result of a series of military conflicts and interstate agreements, by 1921 the territory of Volyn (present-day Volyn and Rivne oblasts), as well as Eastern Galicia and other western Ukrainian ethnic lands, came under the control of the Polish state — the Second Polish Republic. The independent Ukrainian state — the Ukrainian People’s Republic — was destroyed through the efforts of Bolshevik Russia and Poland. Ukrainians and other national minorities faced discrimination in the Second Polish Republic. The government’s policy toward the “eastern borderlands” (kresy) — Western Ukraine, Western Belarus, and Lithuania — bore the hallmarks of a colonial policy. During World War II, ethnic conflicts erupted in these territories: Polish-Ukrainian, Polish-Belarusian, and Polish-Lithuanian.
UPA propaganda leaflet “Freedom for peoples, freedom for the individual” (1949)
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists considered Polish control over Western Ukraine to be an occupation. The ideology of the OUN was integral, or “organized,” nationalism. The OUN’s ideology was close to the ideologies of the European right-wing movements of that era, and was also characteristic of the anti-colonial liberation movements of the 20th century in Europe, Asia, and Africa. During the years of World War II, the OUN’s ideology underwent a transformation toward combining nationalism with democracy.
The ideological and programmatic principles of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, from the very founding of the OUN, envisaged the complete destruction of the Polish population in the western Ukrainian territories
Cover of the official OUN publication “Building the State” (source: Istorychna Pravda)
The main political goal of the OUN was the restoration of a Ukrainian state within its ethnic territories. Not a single OUN program document contains provisions calling for the destruction of the Polish population or of other ethnic or religious groups. Nor were there any such calls in the public statements of OUN leaders. Moreover, during the deployment of the UPA, national units were formed within it composed entirely of representatives of other nationalities: Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Tatars, and others.
The destruction of the Polish population was the first and primary task of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, created in 1942–1943
UPA fighters
The creation of the UPA was a reaction to the harsh occupation regime established by Nazi Germany. The UPA’s aim was to protect the local Ukrainian population from the Nazis and Soviet partisans. Subsequently, the UPA became engaged in fighting the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) and other Polish armed formations that were attempting to establish control over Western Ukraine. Starting in 1944, active confrontation began between the UPA and the Soviet state security organs and the Red Army.
There existed a secret order from the UPA command for the “total destruction of Poles”
There is no documentary evidence of the existence of such an order. Speculation surrounding the so-called secret “Order No. 1” or the “Klym Savur directive” rests on outright forgeries and manipulated testimonies of individual UPA fighters given under NKVD/MGB interrogation, published after World War II.
Anti-Polish actions by Ukrainian insurgents were clearly planned in nature. On the night of July 11–12, 1943, the largest-scale operation took place, during which more than 100 settlements in Volyn were destroyed
Memorial to the victims of Volyn in Warsaw (photo: Ukrinform)
Polish sources from 1943 record that the anti-Polish action of July 11–12 covered “kilkanaście” (i.e., more than 10 but fewer than 20) settlements. The claim of “100 settlements” is based on later oral testimonies rather than authentic documents. Neither German nor Soviet sources contain any confirmation of an operation of such a scale being carried out.
As of the summer of 1943, the UPA did not have sufficient resources to carry out coordinated actions covering dozens of settlements.
In 1944, anti-Polish actions spread to the territory of Galicia (hence the appearance of the relatively new term “Galician massacre”)
The events in Galicia constituted an armed confrontation between Polish and Ukrainian armed formations aimed at establishing control over the region, and from the summer of 1944 onward, also involved the active participation of Soviet state security. All sides of the conflict committed war crimes against the civilian population and prisoners.
The killings of Ukrainians in the Chełm region in 1942–1943 have no connection whatsoever to the events in Volyn or Galicia
The first documented cases of violence by Polish units against the Ukrainian population of the Chełm region date to the summer of 1942. Attacks by Polish underground fighters on Ukrainian villages were preceded by the killings of individual members of the Ukrainian community.
At the same time, in Volyn, UPA units carried out attacks on Poles — mainly on employees of the German occupation administration and officials from the era of the Second Polish Republic. The spiraling cycle of mutual violence fairly quickly escalated into attacks on the civilian population amid the armed conflict between Polish and Ukrainian partisan formations. The events in Volyn, Galicia, the Chełm region, Podlasie, and the Sian region were part of the Polish-Ukrainian confrontation under German occupation, which continued even after the expulsion of the Nazis.
The Polish underground, during the conflict, carried out only defensive and retaliatory actions
A Home Army soldier and a killed Ukrainian peasant, village of Sahryń in the Chełm region (March 1944)
The Home Army, the Peasant Battalions, and other Polish units, as well as Poles serving in Soviet “istrebitelny” [destroyer] battalions and the German auxiliary police, committed murders and other crimes against the Ukrainian civilian population. Representatives of Polish historiography tend to call these crimes “retaliatory actions” and to “justify” them by citing UPA crimes against Polish civilians committed beforehand. To “explain” crimes for which no convincing pretext could be found, the term “preventive retaliatory actions” is used. This effectively refers to “preventive punishment” or “preventive revenge” against civilians for crimes that Ukrainian partisans had only yet to commit in the future.
The deportation of Ukrainians carried out as part of Operation Vistula was a forced military operation directed against the Ukrainian insurgent movement, not against the Ukrainian population
Eviction of a Ukrainian village, April 1947
Operation Vistula was de facto an ethnic cleansing carried out by the communist regime of postwar Poland together with Stalinist USSR in April–July 1947. More than 140,000 Ukrainians from the Chełm region, Podlasie, the Sian region, and the Lemko region were deported, mainly to the northwest of Poland — the “Recovered Territories,” from which the expulsion of the German population was still ongoing. The Polish government resettled Poles deported from the territories annexed by the USSR — Western Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania — into these same territories.
The coordinated actions of the communist regimes of the Kremlin and Warsaw were aimed at “cleansing” the border territories of a potentially disloyal population and “evening out” their ethnic composition.
There are sufficient grounds to consider the destruction of Poles in Western Ukraine as genocide
Memorial to Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation in the village of Pavlivka, Volyn oblast (photo: Istorychna Pravda)
The use of the term “genocide” with respect to the Polish-Ukrainian conflict during World War II is a political assessment rather than a scientific or legal one. Ukrainian and foreign historians generally regard these events as an armed conflict (war) between the Polish and Ukrainian partisan movements, during which both sides carried out actions that can be classified as ethnic cleansing.
Various German formations, the Red Army, Soviet partisans and state security organs, as well as criminal groups not under the control of either the Germans, the Soviets, the OUN, or the Polish underground state, were involved in the conflict at different periods. Crimes against civilians were committed by all sides of the conflict, motivated by revenge, the settling of personal scores, plunder, the destruction of the partisan movement’s support base, and so on.
In Ukrainian historiography and collective memory, the Ukrainian-Polish confrontation during World War II has an established name — the “Volyn Tragedy.” The efforts of the state and society are directed toward Polish-Ukrainian understanding and reconciliation and toward establishing dialogue. Its results have included the resumption of search and exhumation work, the reburial of victims according to Christian traditions, and the resumption of the work of the Polish-Ukrainian Congress of Historians in May 2026. Avoiding political speculation about the tragic pages of the past and directing efforts toward addressing shared contemporary challenges for the sake of the future serves the interests of both states. After all, the beneficiary of Polish-Ukrainian conflicts in the past has always been Moscow.
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