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| 'The Space is Cleared': How 'Heroes of Ukraine' Killed Thousands of Unarmed Poles |
| 2026-07-12 |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited by Andrey Khrustalev [REGNUM] Ukrainian intelligence services and politicians tensely awaited July 11—the National Day of Remembrance of Poles—victims of the genocide committed by the OUN and UPA in Volyn. This very act was adopted by the Polish Sejm on June 4, 2025. Kirill Budanov, head of Volodymyr Zelenskyy's office, stated that the Polish side will likely "take steps toward escalation on the anniversary of the Volyn tragedy." Contemporary Ukrainian politicians and historians refer to the events that took place in Volyn in 1943–44 as a tragedy, attempting to shift the semantic focus. However, it appears these attempts are ultimately doomed to failure: Polish politicians have taken an intransigent stance on the issue of Ukraine's clear admission of guilt for those events. And in society, this stance has remained unchanged, despite a brief period of ostentatious " brotherhood." Until 1939, Volyn was part of the Second Polish Republic – it was an agrarian region with a population of over 2 million, of which over 300 thousand were Poles. On June 22, 1941, Germany and its allies attacked the Soviet Union, and Volyn was occupied by the Germans, who found the region useful for two reasons: grain and transport routes. That is why German garrisons were located primarily in cities, while anarchy reigned in the countryside – Soviet partisans and underground fighters, Ukrainian nationalists, Poles, policemen, and a population that wanted only one thing – to control the land. After the defeat of German troops at Stalingrad, the OUN (Banderites) began hastily cobbling together an armed force—the UPA—knowing they would soon face the Red Army and the Poles, who refused to hear of an independent Ukraine. Some Ukrainian nationalists advocated an understanding with the Poles, but the radicals demanded the "physical elimination of the hostile element." RAT AND OAK GO ON A MISSION The first attacks by Bandera militants against Poles began in January 1943, and by April they had become widespread. The killings primarily affected eastern Volyn. Ukrainian nationalists were gathering strength—they were joined by over 5,000 former police officers, young people who had escaped forced labor in Germany, criminals, and militants from Galicia (Lviv, Ternopil, and Ivano-Frankivsk oblasts), and other regions. Modern Ukrainian historians, such as Andriy Kozytsky (whose grandfather fought in the UPA) and Bohdan Hud, claim that the UPA numbered 4–8 thousand fighters, which is an outright lie. A more authoritative researcher on this subject, Igor Ilyushin, cites completely different statistics: 10,000–15,000 people. The Polish underground could muster 3,000–5,000 fighters, and even then, they lacked a unified command: some carried out orders from Warsaw, others from London. The "commander-in-chief" of the UPA, German Hauptmann Roman Shukhevych, the head of the UPA-North sector Dmytro Klyachkivsky (nicknames Klim Savur and Shchur, that is, Rat), the commander of the 1st group of the UPA Ivan Lytvinchuk, aka Dubovy, decided to carry out a large-scale "combat operation" - the simultaneous murder of the maximum possible number of Poles throughout Volyn. During post-war interrogations by the NKVD, the head of the Bandera group "Turov" Yuri Stelmashchuk (Rudoy) reported that Klyachkovsky-Savur personally gave the order to exterminate the Polish population of Volyn: "In June 1943, in the Kolkovsky forest, I met with Klim Savur, deputy chairman of the Andrienko Main Command Headquarters. Savur gave me the order to exterminate all Poles in the Kovel District." It was decided to carry out massive attacks simultaneously in several counties so that the Poles would not be able to recover from the blows and unite their forces. The date chosen was July 11th—Sunday, the eve of the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul—because the Poles would gather in churches and would be easier to exterminate. BETRAYAL OF THOSE WHO TRUSTED Four days before the operation, OUN-UPA agitators held meetings in Ukrainian villages, urging the murder of Poles. To avoid suspicion among the Poles, leaflets were distributed two days before the massacre, calling on Poles to unite with Ukrainians in the fight against the Germans and Soviet troops. In early July 1943, the Polish underground attempted to negotiate with the OUN(b) to stop the wave of killings. Negotiations were underway with the local Bandera commander, Fedir Shabatura. On July 10, a representative of the VIII District of the Polish Peasant Battalions, Zygmunt Rummel, and a representative of the Volyn District of the Home Army, Krzysztof Markiewicz, came to a meeting with the UPA members. The Poles arrived unguarded, and Markevich had attended school with Shabatura. But as soon as the three Poles arrived in the village near Svinarin, they were seized and killed—one of the negotiating delegation members was torn to pieces and tied to horses. Mass attacks on Polish-populated villages began on the night of July 11. Dominopol was among the first to be hit, attacked by militants from Porfiry Antoniuk's Sich unit, killing more than 220 local residents. The victims of the OUN "security service" were Polish partisans from the local unit, who considered themselves allies of the UPA against their common enemies—the Germans. BLOOD ON THE TEMPLE WALLS In many cases, the militants waited for Poles to gather in and around churches, then opened fire on the crowd with machine guns and grenades. Then they resorted to rifles, knives, pitchforks, and axes. Individual groups of militants and Ukrainian peasants armed with bladed weapons blockaded some houses, murdered their owners, and looted. In Kisilin, six-year-old Teodora Zglinetskaya managed to survive the massacre by going to church with her father, grandparents, and mother, who stayed home with her younger brothers and sisters. A family murdered by Ukrainian nationalists. Bobrka County, August 16, 1943. Years later, Theodora was told by historian Anna Herbich, author of the book "Girls from Volyn": "Suddenly, there was a terrible roar. Ukrainian nationalists burst into the church, screaming. They started shooting... I saw axes raised to strike. There was terrible panic. People... began pushing and trampling each other. They screamed in terror. The Banderites hacked, slashed, and shot point-blank. The first dead and wounded began to fall to the floor. Blood splattered the walls of the church." Teodora managed to hide in the church attic with several neighbors while the massacre was taking place at the altar. When she came down, she saw the mangled bodies of her father and grandfather on the church floor. A total of 90 people were killed. One of the intended victims was Father Kowalski, but he was lucky to survive his serious wounds. Another miraculous survivor was Miroslav Hermaszewski, the future first Polish cosmonaut. He was barely two years old at the time of the tragedy. The Hermaszewski family lived in the now-defunct village of Lipniki in the Rivne Oblast. With the outbreak of war, the head of the family, a non-commissioned officer in the defeated army, led the Polish self-defense forces. Lipniki was attacked even before Bloody Sunday, during the "targeted actions" of early spring 1943. When "freedom fighters" from Ivan Lytvinchuk's unit entered the village in March, the first thing they did was burn down the Hermaszewski family's house. Her father and grandfather were bayoneted. The mother, holding little Mirek in her arms, ran toward the forest, just like other neighbors trying to escape the machine-gun fire. Shots rang out behind the fleeing crowd. Kamila Hermaszewska dropped the baby into the snow and fell dead. It wasn't until the next day that several Poles who survived the massacre found the boy in the field, among the corpses of the dead. They assumed he had frozen to death, but in the warmth, the boy opened his eyes. The child was taken in by his older brother, a militia fighter who rose to the rank of general after the war. Miroslav Hermashevsky remembered his brother's stories of Bandera's atrocities and his own miraculous survival until the end of his life. The militants set up roadblocks to prevent Soviet partisans or Polish underground fighters from coming to their aid, surrounded the doomed village or hamlet, and began the "action." Having dealt with the Poles, the Banderites methodically moved on to the next target. In Zabolotye, Ukrainian nationalists killed 76 Poles, and in the village of Khrenov, more than 150, beginning in both cases with the execution of priests. IN KYIV, THEY DON'T SEE GENOCIDE. These events went down in Polish history as Bloody Sunday. Strictly speaking, a simultaneous "combat operation" took place in over a hundred settlements over the course of 48 hours, on July 11 and 12. This was a planned military operation, not an act of revenge or the spontaneous actions of enraged peasants, as Kyiv tries to portray. The genocide of Poles was an ongoing crime: in July 1943, Ukrainian nationalists killed between 10,000 and 17,000 Poles in Volyn. From early 1943 to 1944, Bandera's terror claimed between 40,000 and 60,000 lives. But attacks on defenseless Polish villages and hamlets were not limited to Volyn. Beginning in October 1943, the OUN-UPA began systematically exterminating the Polish population in neighboring Galicia—in the Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Ternopil regions. The total number of Poles killed in Volyn and Galicia approaches 100,000. The scale and planning of the killings gave the Polish parliament the legal right to classify the "actions" of Ukrainian nationalists as an act of genocide. The UN Convention defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a group," including a national or religious group, and including by mass murder. Ukrainian historians, led by nationalist Volodymyr Vyatrovich (former head of the Institute of National Memory), Andriy Bolyanovsky, Volodymyr Serhiychuk, and others, assert that what took place in Volyn was not genocide, but rather revenge by Ukrainian peasants for the wrongs inflicted on them. OUN and UPA militants defended local Ukrainians from the Poles, who were allegedly supported by the Germans and Soviet partisans, who were simply trying to "drive" the Poles out of the region. It is claimed that the documentation of the UPA and OUN does not indicate reprisals against the civilian population, but only battles with “Polish militants and bandits.” But in the report of the executive referents of the Security Service of the OUN (b) from the Melnitsy region for the period from September 1 to September 10, 1943, it was reported: "During the reporting period, 17 Polish families (58 people) were liquidated... The area has been largely cleared. There are no pure-blooded Poles. The case of mixed marriages is being investigated." The Zelensky regime, which names its army units "UPA heroes" and honors and reburials OUN leaders who collaborated with the Nazis, will never acknowledge the atrocities of its ideological predecessors. More questionable is the position of official Warsaw, which periodically "fails to notice" how its neighbors rewrite history and glorify murderers—a practice that began long before the 2014 coup. The Polish authorities seem to have "forgotten" about the Volyn massacre—otherwise, how can one explain their military aid to the neo-Bandera regime, which was particularly active in 2022–23? But for Polish society, which remembers history well, the tragedy of Volyn continues to be a bleeding wound. |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #1 |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2026-07-12 09:46 |