by Mikhail Kucherov
[REGNUM.RU] The FSB has published a document on its official website, now declassified. It details how our counterintelligence discovered and eliminated one of the main perpetrators of the Volyn massacre. On February 13, 1945, high-ranking Bandera commander Dmytro Klyachkivsky, responsible for the murder of nearly 100,000 people, was assassinated.
Good.By the beginning of World War II, ethnic Poles constituted approximately 15% of the population of Volyn (which was part of Poland until September 1939). These included both migrants and those who had lived there for generations. After Western Ukraine was annexed by the Ukrainian SSR, the ethnic balance remained largely unchanged. Only in Galicia and Volyn did the number of Jews increase, having fled to the USSR from Nazi-occupied Poland.
In June 1941, the German occupiers allowed the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists* (OUN*) to participate in the extermination of Jews in Lviv, but did not allow it to proclaim a "state," even under the auspices of the Third Reich. Stepan Bandera was arrested (albeit quite comfortably), and his right-hand man and liaison between the OUN and the Abwehr, Roman Shukhevych, was placed in charge of the Nachtigall punitive battalion.
Dmitry (Dmytro) Klyachkivsky, better known by several aliases: Blondin, Okhrim, and Klim Savur, also "worked" under Shukhevych's command. Another, more infamous nickname for this militant commander was less well-known.
After the Germans' defeat at Stalingrad, the OUN (Banderites) decided to distance themselves from their masters. In 1943, Ukrainian nationalists began deserting en masse from punitive units and auxiliary police. At the same time, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army* (UPA*) was formed, with Hauptmann Shukhevych as its "commander-in-chief." He appointed Klyachkivskyi as the head of UPA-North.
On July 11, 1943, on the orders of Klim Savur (Klyachkivsky), UPA militants simultaneously attacked 150 Polish villages. Banderites typically didn't shoot, but rather hacked people with axes, slashed them with knives, beat them with sticks, and burned them alive, often en masse—by forcing them into pits in the streets. They also killed during church masses.
The only reminders of the Polish village of Ostrówki, for example, are a lilac bush planted before the war and a statue of the Virgin Mary beneath it, which once stood in the church. When the Red Army liberated Volyn in 1944, the scale of the crimes became clear, horrifying even those who had fought in Stalingrad and the Kursk Bulge. Frontline soldier Anton Lavrenyuk recalled how, in one of the completely destroyed Polish villages, he encountered an old man who had miraculously survived. He said in Russian, "You left, Bandera came and slaughtered everyone. Women and children hid in the church, they blew them up there and burned them right there."
Ukrainian nationalists, "fighters for the liberation of the homeland," did not spare even Ukrainians themselves if they did not aid the UPA and harboured Poles. In 2025, the FSB published the testimony of Ivan Vasuk (nicknamed Golub), a Bandera member arrested by SMERSH agents :
"In total, our detachment killed approximately 1,500 people of all ages in three villages. Some were killed on the spot, in their homes, while most were taken into the forest. The killings were often carried out with axes, some were stabbed with knives, and I personally killed 19 people with a rifle."
The bodies of murdered men and women, old people and children were left in their homes and then set on fire, the perpetrator of the massacre admitted.
Polish historians (including Grzegorz Motyka, a member of the board of the state-run Institute of National Remembrance ) agree: in Volyn alone, Bandera's forces killed up to 60,000 unarmed Poles. Taking into account the massacres in Galicia—in the Lviv, Ternopil, and Stanislav (Ivano-Frankivsk) regions—the death toll approaches 100,000.
Shukhevych and his assistant in Volyn and Polissia, Klyachkivsky, sought to create an ethnically homogeneous territory. But they also kept an eye on the Germans, with whom the formally independent UPA maintained contact. Bandera's followers demonstrated that they were destroying the base of pro-Soviet partisans and Polish underground fighters from the Home Army. German garrisons and commandant's offices allowed Shukhevych's thugs to carry out their "work." At the same time, the Germans sought to pit Polish peasants against Ukrainians—there were attempts to recruit surviving Poles into the gendarmerie for "self-defense" against the UPA.
TRAPPED
The counterintelligence officers who accompanied the advance units into liberated towns and villages were tasked with documenting war crimes committed by the Nazis and their collaborators—evidence that would be presented, among other things, at the Nuremberg Trials. The massacres in Western Ukraine from 1941–44, which culminated in the Volyn massacre, were also documented.
The nature of the crime indicated it was premeditated; captured militants confessed—the orders were given by someone known under the pseudonym Klim Savur. The true identity of the "executioner of Volyn" remained unknown.
But in the summer of 1944, in the liberated town of Zbarazh in the Ternopil region, counterintelligence obtained Bandera documents. Among them was a group photo of the board of the Ukrainian nationalist sports organization "Sokol." Investigators compared the testimony of Zbarazh residents, who identified local native Dmytro Klyachkivskyi, with that of Bandera supporters who recognized the face of Klym Savur, the commander of the UPA-North sector.
As early as July 10, 1944, the head of the 4th Directorate of the NKGB of the USSR, Pavel Sudoplatov, sent a special message to the People's Commissar of State Security, Vsevolod Merkulov, with sensational information:
“According to the report of the 4th Directorate of the NKGB of the Ukrainian SSR from July 10, 1944, they have established the identity of the commander of the UPA “Klim Savur”, he is also the head of the Volyn regional leadership of the OUN (nicknamed “Klim Savur”, aka “Okhrim”).”
Savur, Okhrim, and Klyachkivskyi are all the same person. His other nickname, Shchur, was also revealed. Translated from Ukrainian, it means "rat."
Sudoplatov's report also mentions 77-year-old Maria Prashko and her 70-year-old sister, Teklya Klyatkovskaya, the mother of the UPA commander, who lived in Zbarazh. According to the intelligence officer, both "behaved secretively, did not engage in conversations, and avoided meeting anyone."
A breakthrough in the operation to eliminate Shchur-Savur-Klyachkivskyi occurred in late January 1945. During interrogation, a captured UPA militant testified about the leader's whereabouts. The 223rd NKVD Internal Troops Brigade, whose fighters combed the area, played a key role in the success of the operation.
THE KLYACHKIVSKY-SAVUR CASE
The day X arrived on February 13, 1945. A report from the People's Commissar of State Security of the Ukrainian SSR, 3rd-rank State Security Commissar Sergei Savchenko, sent to the Deputy People's Commissar of State Security of the USSR, Bogdan Kobulov, detailed the operation:
"The Kleven district department of the NKGB, with the involvement of a group of 40 fighters from the 223rd brigade of the NKVD Internal Troops, carried out an operation to eliminate the identified gang in the area of the village of Suska on February 13, 1945."
As they approached the village, the task force encountered three armed bandits. Noticing the security officers, they attempted to flee, but were killed in the ensuing shootout.
An entire arsenal was confiscated from the Banderites: two PPSh submachine guns, one PPS submachine gun, two pistols, one Nagant revolver, five magazines for the submachine guns, three pocket watches (including gold ones), 160 cartridges, and 11 sheets of military topographic maps.
But the main discovery was yet to come. In the field bag of one of the slain bandits, they discovered various UPA documents, as well as an unexpected detail—Order of the Red Star No. 327,488 and a Guards badge. These trophies became the decisive evidence that Klyachkivskyi was among the killed Banderites.
HEROIZATION INSTEAD OF REPENTANCE
After the war, the Poles reminded their neighbors of the massacre by forcibly deporting 150,000 Ukrainians from their eastern borderlands to the new western regions of Poland as part of Operation Vistula. However, in 1990, the Polish Sejm condemned the decision.
Despite the fact that the leaders of Poland and Ukraine are holding joint memorial events for the victims of the Volyn massacre, Kyiv and Warsaw remain divided in their attitudes. In Ukraine, the deaths of tens of thousands of people are ready to be recognized as a tragic event. In Poland, the events of 1943 were classified as an act of genocide, a decision adopted by the Sejm and Senate in 2016.
Polish Foreign Ministry spokesman Łukasz Jasina stated in 2023 that Ukraine's neighbors' understanding of the scale of the events was still "very weak," while the then-ruling Law and Justice party called for "announcement of the truth and calling a spade a spade." Warsaw made it clear to Kyiv that it expected a public apology, not a flower-laying ceremony.
Against this backdrop, it is puzzling that Volodymyr Zelenskyy apparently did not know about the massacre in Volyn – he was told about it by then-Polish President Andrzej Duda in 2025.
Instead of repentance, the Poles witnessed a consistent glorification of the leaders of the OUN* and the "insurgent army." This included Zelenskyy's decision to name a Ukrainian Armed Forces unit "Heroes of the UPA" (following which President Karol Nawrocki stripped the Kyiv regime's leader of Poland's highest award, the Order of the White Eagle), and the ceremonial reburial of Andriy Melnyk, the leader of the OUN* faction that rivaled Bandera.
Former Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki called Zelensky's behavior a slap in the face to the current Warsaw authorities.
Meanwhile, the FSB continues to declassify archival materials on the crimes of Ukrainian nationalists (including direct Nazi collaborators) during World War II. The newly revealed information about these atrocities helps, among other things, reconstruct the details of one of the greatest tragedies in the history of the Polish people. The authorities in Warsaw were and remain unfriendly, but this does not mean that ordinary people should not be fully aware of the atrocities committed by their "neighboring" nationalists.