#Volyn massacre

[immaculatasknight]

Strange bedfellows

[nasermater]

"shut up about Wołyń!"

Never.

The massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia (Polish: rzeź wołyńska, lit. 'Volhynian slaughter'; Ukrainian: Волинська трагедія, romanized: Volynska trahediia, lit. 'Volyn tragedy') were carried out in German-occupied Poland by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) with the support of parts of the local Ukrainian population against the Polish minority in Volhynia, Eastern Galicia, parts of Polesia and Lublin region from 1943 to 1945.

The peak of the massacres took place in July and August 1943. The massacres were exceptionally brutal and affected primarily women and children. The UPA's actions resulted in about 50,000 to 100,000 deaths. Other victims of the massacres included several hundred Jews, Russians, Czechs, Georgians, and Ukrainians who were part of Polish families or opposed the UPA and sabotaged the massacres by hiding Polish escapees.

Ukrainians ruthlessly slaughtered Polish civilians and destroyed their homes. Villages were burned to the ground and property was looted. The perpetrators used bullets, axes, pitchforks, knives, and other weapons. Many Poles were killed in churches.

On 22 July 2016, the Sejm established 11 July as National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Genocide committed by ukrainian nationalists against the citizens of the Second Polish Republic. This classification is disputed by Ukraine and some non-Polish historians.

[mariacallous]

While PiS obsesses about setting up a commission to investigate political rivals under the cover of rooting out ‘Russian influence’, experts warn there’s plenty of other groups of potential concern that the Polish intelligence services should be looking at.

Among the various demonstrations that usually compete for the attention of the public on May 1 in Warsaw, a new protagonist emerged this year: the Polish Anti-War Movement.

This nascent movement, formally launched on February 3 in Czestochowa, a city in southern Poland, opposes Poland’s support for Ukraine against the Russian invaders, arguing that it is dragging Warsaw into a war between NATO and Russia that shouldn’t be its business.

“Today they want our tanks, but tomorrow they will want our children,” Ewa, an activist with the movement, claimed in her speech during the May 1 rally organised by the Polish Anti-War Movement in the centre of Warsaw.

Ewa, who said she was a mother of four, appealed to other parents to oppose her country’s involvement in the war in Ukraine, arguing that soon Poland would be caught up in a direct military confrontation with Russia and “Polish sons” would be conscripted into the armed forces.

“This is a war for American dollars,” Ewa said at the end of her speech. “Yankees go home!” she concluded, with the crowd of around 200 people picking up on the chant.

The Polish Anti-War Movement is the most recent in a lengthening list of actors who oppose what they call “the Ukrainization of Poland” in the public space, many of them associated with the far-right of the political spectrum. While no clear links to Russia have been established, experts warn that these should be investigated much more thoroughly given how much the “anti-Ukrainization” message fits with Russian propaganda goals in this country.

‘Pacifist’ movement

The Polish Anti-War Movement is primarily the initiative of Leszek Sykulski, an academic specialising in defence issues, who was once a security analyst in the office of the late president Lech Kaczynski and a member of a commission investigating Poland’s secret services led by the Law and Justice party (PiS) hardliner Antoni Macierewicz.

In the first months of the movement, Sykulski advertised it side by side with Sebastian Piton, who became notorious in Poland during the COVID-19 pandemic for mobilising efforts against restrictions on businesses in the south of the country. Piton quit the movement in early May.

During the launch event of the movement on February 3, Sykulski and Piton took turns to read out a declaration explaining the nature of their movement, which they described as grassroots and independent of political parties, with primarily information and education goals.

“We do not support the Russian aggression against Ukraine, but we want to say that this is not our war,” Sykulski read from the declaration. “We want to have good relations with all our neighbours.”

“There is no support here for the hegemonic policy of the US… and for taking part in Washington’s wars of aggression,” he added.

The two said the movement was opposed to Poland offering any financial or military support to Ukraine for as long as “the myths of Bandera and genocidal organisations are cultivated there”; Poland and Ukraine have yet to reconcile their official versions of the Volyn massacre, when nationalist Ukrainian partisans killed tens of thousands of Polish civilians during World War II.

“We do not agree to public funds being dedicated to social help for Ukrainian migrants or the organised re-settlement of Ukrainians here,” the declaration went on.

The discourse proposed by Sykulski and his colleagues from the Polish Anti-War Movement includes elements of at least two major conspiracy theories popular worldwide: “The New World Order”, according to which Western banks and corporations want to establish global control, including by imposing “gender ideology” and ecological standards (in this frame, the war in Ukraine is seen as a fight between the colonising West and the resisting East); and the “Great Replacement Theory”, according to which white populations in Europe will be gradually replaced by non-white ones (adapted here to refer to an alleged mass resettlement of Ukrainians in Poland).

Sykulski refused a request for an interview and did not reply to written questions sent to him either.

While there is so far no evidence that Sykulski’s movement in Poland receives either Russian financing or guidance, the Polish authorities have expressed concern about his activities.

In January, Stanislaw Zaryn, government plenipotentiary for cyber-security, told the Polish Press Agency in an interview: “Mr Sykulski is an ‘expert’ whose interventions are often in line with Russian propaganda. Switching responsibility for the war on to the West and attempts to ‘clean up its reputation’ are one of the standard ways through which Moscow tries to distort reality.”

However, Zaryn stressed that his concerns did not mean anything had been determined about potential connections between Sykulski and Russian security structures, and that identifying such problematic links was the job of the Polish intelligence agencies. “I reject the fact that our alerts be treated as a basis to make accusations that concrete people work as agents,” he said.

In a press conference held together with parliamentarian Grzegorz Braun from the far-right Confederation alliance earlier this year, Sykulski branded accusations against him as attempts to censor free speech.

‘Stop the Ukrainization of Poland’

Yet the Polish Anti-War Movement is only one of a number of actors that have been warning about the “Ukrainization of Poland”, with some of them active since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

One of the most prominent proponents of this discourse in Poland is Grzegorz Braun from the far-right Confederation, who even organised a session in parliament on that topic last summer. Braun is known for opposing the opening of Poland’s borders to Ukrainian refugees in the first days of the war and expressing support for vigilantes who attacked non-white refugees from Ukraine on the streets of border town Przemysl in early March 2022. However, there are other such actors in Poland.

“The Polish Anti-War Movement is not the only pro-Russian organisation in Poland,” Anna Mierzynska, a Polish disinformation expert, tells BIRN. “There is the new political party of Krzystof Tolwinski, ‘Front’, and then Wojciech Olszanski and Marcin Osadowski are waiting for the registration of a new party ‘Bracia Kamraci’.”

“Like the Polish Anti-War Movement, these political parties are marginal,” says the expert. “But they nevertheless have officially collected signatures, looked for candidates, and organised protests and meetings, etc.,” Mierzynska says. “I think that Russia wanted to have some organisations active in Poland before the election this autumn – it means gaining more footholds as far as influence is concerned.”

Writing for the online portal oko.press, Mierzynska prepared a list of 10 organisations, individuals or events around which she thinks the Polish intelligence services should investigate Russian influence in Poland. The list includes Braun and other far-right politicians, the Polish Anti-War Movement, Ordo Iuris, anti-vaxxers and others. Some of the entries on the list refer to much more momentous developments than the small Anti-War Movement, including massive email leaks from high-profile PiS politicians’ inboxes (the “Dworczyk leaks”) or the wiretapping scandal that contributed to PiS winning the election in 2015 (“Sowa i przyjaciele”).

“The affairs or actions of concrete individuals on the list have been waiting for a long time to be investigated properly,” Mierzynska wrote in the introduction to her article. “Sadly, there is no indication that such investigations will be conducted in the near future. The new commission created via #LexTusk will be fully dependent on the PiS government, meaning that it will execute the political interests of that party.”

Her opinion is echoed by Anna Gielewska, co-founder of the Polish investigative outlet frontstory.pl, which has also extensively investigated Russian disinformation in Poland. “Ironically, amid all this Polish political turmoil over false Russian influence, real Russian influence may easily go unnoticed,” Gielewska wrote in a recent comment for online outlet VSquare.

“Busy with chasing Tusk and the opposition, Polish intelligence has been struggling with taking action against far-right politicians like Grzegorz Braun and his aides, or against far-right activists and social media influencers spreading pro-Russian narratives and anti-Ukrainian propaganda,” she said.

[warcrimesimulator]

2016 when i was talking to that Polish girl at my uni and I was like "oh yeah Poland, I've heard of that, in fact I know many things about that .. like .." [remembered that the only thing i knew about Polish history was the fucking Volyn massacre, clearly the perfect conversation starter] "um. uh. like...... so remember that time in 1943 when a lot of people died-"

[sa7abnews]

Polish PM threatens to block Ukraine’s EU bid

New Post has been published on Sa7ab News

Polish PM threatens to block Ukraine’s EU bid

Kiev must resolve the Volyn massacre issue with Warsaw and adopt “European political culture” if it wants to join EU, Polish PM Tusk says

... read more !

[head-post]

Ukraine allegedly raises territorial claims against Poland

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called parts of Poland “Ukrainian territories,” sparking outrage among Polish politicians.

Speaking on the last day of the Campus Polska Przyszłości (Poland of the Future) on 28 August, Kuleba delved into the historical details of Operation Vistula, which was carried out in 1947 in parts of the present-day Lublin, Podkarpackie and Małopolskie voivodeships (provinces) of Poland.

A female campus participant asked him when Poland would finally be able to exhume the graves of the victims of the Volhynia massacre carried out by Polish nationalists in 1943-1944. He responded:

Do you know what Operation Vistula was, and do you know that all those Ukrainians were forcibly expelled from Ukrainian territories, including Olsztyn? But that’s not what I’m talking about. If we started digging into history today, the quality of the conversation would be completely different, we could go deeper into history and remind ourselves of the bad things that Poles did to Ukrainians and Ukrainians to Poles.

He said Ukraine had “no problem with continuing the exhumation in Volyn [region].”

“We only have a request to the Polish government to also honour the memory of Ukrainians. We want it to be bilateral.”

Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski responded on Thursday, 29 August, acknowledging that the historical issue was “a problem in our relations, which Ukraine would solve in a spirit of gratitude for the aid Poland is giving it.”

We have a choice: either we can deal with the past, which is important and our victims deserve a Christian burial, but unfortunately we are unable to bring them back to life. Or we can focus on building a common future so that demons don’t speak in our societies, and so that a common enemy doesn’t threaten us in the future. I prefer the second approach.

However, the main indignation in Poland was caused not so much by the actual territorial claims made by the head of Ukraine’s diplomacy, but by the comparison of the Volhynia massacre and Operation Vistula.

Polish politician Grzegorz Braun also condemned Kuleba’s words. He shared a post by architect and social activist Sebastian Pitoń on X social media:

“Dmytro Kuleba called the area of ​​Lublin, Subcarpathia and Lesser Poland ‘Ukrainian territories.’ And I repeat after myself: A fifty-meter wall and a moat with acid.”

Read more HERE

[cyberbenb]

Ukraine won't enter EU without settling WWII-era Volyn massacre issue, Polish minister says

Ukraine will not join the EU without resolving the historical issue of the mass killings of Poles in Volyn, which took place in the 1940s, Polish Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz said on Jul Source : kyivindependent.com/ukraine-e…

[protoslacker]

Earlier, Polish President Andrzej Duda said that this July, Ukraine and Poland would hold a series of joint events to commemorate the victims of the Volhynia (Volyn)  massacre.

On 7 July, Mateusz Morawiecki, Polish Prime Minister, paid tribute to the victims of the Volhynia (Volyn) massacre in the abandoned village of Ostruvky in Volyn Oblast, northwestern Ukraine.

[bemmelanonymous]

Volyn. Vandaag, 80 jaar geleden.

[immaculatasknight]

Bad neighbors

[cowboyponobay]

🇵🇱🇺🇦 Gazeta Wyborcza: Kiev must apologize for the Volyn massacre in order to continue military assistance.

Gazeta Wyborcza is the leading socio-political publication in Poland.

[dendeniel]

Kiev should apologize for the Volyn massacre in order to continue military assistance — Poland's leading socio-political publication

Ukraine's refusal to admit responsibility for the Volyn massacre against the background of military assistance from Warsaw is outrageous.

[elzhebietta]

VOLYN MASSACRE

The events described took place more than seventy years ago…

The post was not created to incite hatred towards Ukrainians, forcing them to project a long-standing evil on modern people. It only shows what kind of brutality fascism was accompanied by and how FEAR makes animals out of people.

Volyn Massacre (Polish. Rzez Wolynska) (Volyn tragedy in Ukrainian Volynska tragediya, Poland. Tragedia Wolynia) is an ethno—political conflict, accompanied by the mass destruction (by Bandera) of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army-OUN (b) of the ethnic Polish civilian population and civilians of other nationalities, including Ukrainians, in the territories of the Volyn-Podillya district (German Generalbezirk Wolhynien-Podolien), which until September 1939 were under Polish administration, started in March 1943 and peaked in July of the same year.

In the spring of 1943, large-scale ethnic cleansing began in Volhynia, occupied by German troops. This criminal action was carried out not by the Nazis, but by the militants of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, who sought to “cleanse” the territory of Volhynia from the Polish population. Ukrainian nationalists surrounded Polish villages and colonies, and then proceeded to murder. They killed everyone — women, old people, children, infants. The victims were shot, beaten with clubs, hacked with axes. Then the corpses of the destroyed Poles were buried somewhere in the field, their property was robbed, and finally houses were set on fire. In place of the Polish villages, only burnt ruins remained.

Those Poles who lived in the same villages with Ukrainians were also destroyed. It was even easier — there was no need to gather large detachments. Groups of OUN members of several people passed through the sleeping village, entered the houses of Poles and killed everyone. And then the locals buried the murdered villagers of the “wrong” nationality.

So several tens of thousands of people were killed, whose only fault was that they were not born Ukrainians and lived on Ukrainian soil.

The Organization of Ukrainian nationalists (Bandera movement) / OUN (b), OUN-B/, or revolutionary / OUN (r), OUN-R/, as well as (briefly in 1943) independent-sovereign / OUN (sd), OUN-SD/ (ukr. The organization of the Ukrainian Nationalists (banderivsky rukh)) — one of the factions of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Currently (since 1992), the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists calls itself the successor of the OUN(b).

In the course of the “Map” study conducted in Poland, it was found that as a result of the actions of the UPA-OUN(B) and the SB OUN (b), in which part of the local Ukrainian population and sometimes detachments of Ukrainian nationalists of other movements took part, the number of Poles killed in Volhynia was at least 36 543 — 36 750 man, whose names and places of death were established. In addition, the same study counted from 13,500 to more than 23,000 Poles whose circumstances of death have not been clarified.

A number of researchers say that the victims of the massacre were probably about 50-60 thousand Poles, during the discussion about the number of victims from the Polish side estimates were given from 30 to 80 thousand.

These massacres were a real massacre. A fragment from the book by the famous historian Timothy Snyder gives an idea of her nightmarish cruelty of the Volyn genocide:

“The first edition of the UPA newspaper, published in July, promised a “shameful death” to all Poles who remained in Ukraine. The UPA was able to carry out its threats. During approximately twelve hours, from the evening of July 11, 1943 to the morning of July 12, the UPA carried out attacks on 176 settlements.... During 1943, UPA units and special detachments of the OUN Security Service killed Poles both individually and collectively in Polish settlements and villages, as well as those Poles who lived in Ukrainian villages. According to numerous reports confirming each other, Ukrainian nationalists and their allies burned houses, shot or drove inside those who tried to escape, and those who managed to be caught on the street were killed with sickles and pitchforks. Churches packed with parishioners were burned to the ground. In order to intimidate the surviving Poles and force them to flee, the bandits exhibited decapitated, crucified, dismembered or disemboweled bodies.”

Even the Germans were amazed at their sadism – gouging out their eyes, ripping open their bellies and brutal torture before death were commonplace. They killed everyone – women, children…

The genocide began in the cities. Men of the “wrong” nationality were immediately taken to prisons, where they And the violence against women took place right in broad daylight for the amusement of the public. There were many Bandera people who wanted to get “in line” - to take an active part…were later shot.

And the violence against women took place right in broad daylight for the amusement of the public. There were many Bandera people who wanted to get “in line” - to take an active part…

She was lucky.. Bandera members are forced to go on their knees with their hands raised.

Later, the Banderites got a “taste".

On February 9, 1943, Bandera members from the Pyotr Netovich gang, disguised as Soviet partisans, entered the Polish village of Parosle near Vladimirets, Rivne region. The peasants, who had previously provided assistance to the partisans, warmly welcomed the guests. Having had enough, the bandits began to rape women and girls.

Before the murder, their breasts, noses and ears were cut off.

Men were deprived of their genitals before death. Finished off with blows of an axe on the head.

Two teenagers, the Gorshkevich brothers, who tried to call for help from real partisans, had their bellies cut open, legs and arms cut off, salt was poured abundantly over the wounds, leaving the half-dead to die in the field. A total of 173 people, including 43 children, were brutally tortured in this village. When the partisans entered the village on the second day, they saw piles of disfigured bodies lying in pools of blood in the villagers' houses. In one of the houses, a dead one-year-old child lay on a table among the leftovers and half-finished bottles of moonshine, whose naked body was nailed to the boards of the table with a bayonet. The monsters stuffed a half-eaten pickled cucumber into his mouth.

LIPNIKI, Kostopol county, Lutsk voivodeship. March 26, 1943. A resident of the Lipniki colony is Yakub Varumzer without a head, the result of a massacre committed under the cover of night by OUN—UPA terrorists. As a result of this massacre, 179 Polish residents died in Lipniki, as well as Poles from the surrounding area seeking shelter there. They were mostly women, old people and children (51 — aged from 1 to 14 years), 4 sheltered Jews and 1 Russian. 22 people were injured. Identified by name and surname 121 Polish victims — residents of Lipnik, who were known to the author. Three aggressors also lost their lives.

PODYARKOV, Bobrka county, Lviv voivodeship. August 16, 1943. The results of the torture inflicted on Kleshchinskaya's mother, from a Polish family of four.

From the village of Volkovyya, one night Bandera brought a whole family to the forest. For a long time they mocked unhappy people. Then, when they saw that the wife of the head of the family was pregnant, they cut her stomach, pulled the fetus out of it, and pushed a live rabbit instead. One night, bandits broke into the Ukrainian village of Lozovaya. Over 100 peaceful peasants were killed within 1.5 hours. A bandit burst into Nastya Dyagun's hut with an axe in his hands and hacked down her three sons. The youngest, four-year-old Vladik, had his arms and legs cut off.

And there was a lot of such outrage on the part of Bandera. There are a lot of bloody horrors, dismemberment, abuse of the living and the dead.

LIPNIKI, Kostopol county, Lutsk voivodeship. March 26, 1943. The view before the funeral. The Polish victims of the night massacre committed by the OUN—UPA brought to the People's House.

In Poland, the Volyn massacre is very well remembered.

Unfortunately, according to the rules of the site, I can no longer describe to you what happened at that time and provide more archival photos because of their cruelty, but if you are interested, it is easy to find this information on the Internet.

A monument in Poland on which it is written:

“IF I FORGET ABOUT THEM, YOU GOD IN HEAVEN, FORGET ABOUT ME”

[warcrimesimulator]

I don't know if this is funny or not but back in 2017 I made a playlist of random Irish and Scottish songs I enjoyed listening to at the time, and I'd just have this playlist on whenever I was doing other things. This was the same era where like every fucking night after finishing up work for my uni classes I'd stay up until like 4 AM obsessively reading about the Volyn massacre. This has resulted in some associations and I actually get like a fucking Pavlovian response to where if I listen to any of the songs on that particular playlist my brain goes "alright, time to start reading about UPA atrocities"

[alexsmitposts]

"Volyn massacre": the worst crime of Bandera July 11, 1943 will forever remain in the memory of poles as a black date. On this day, Ukrainian nationalists attacked Polish settlements located on the territory of Western Ukraine in order to completely destroy "hostile elements". A hundred and fifty villages and villages were literally covered in blood. The nationalists did not spare anyone.

Attempts at reconciliation Last summer, on the eve of the 73rd anniversary of the terrible tragedy, representatives of Ukraine and Poland exchanged messages. The first tried to smooth over the sharp corners, asked for forgiveness and said that "as long as our peoples are alive, the wounds of history continue to bring pain. But our peoples will live only when, despite the past, we learn to treat each other as brothers." The second, in principle, do not mind making contact, but there is only one problem. This was the response of the members of the Parliament of the ruling Law and Justice party»: "The difference between us concerns not the future, but the General policy of historical memory. The problem is the current Ukrainian attitude to the perpetrators of the genocide of poles during the Second world war. In Poland, at the state and local levels, we do not honor people who have the blood of innocent civilians on their hands. We are concerned about the selectivity of historical memory, in which an open Declaration of sympathy for Poland is paired with the glorification of those who have on their hands the blood of our countrymen — defenseless women and children." Therefore, attempts at reconciliation once again ended in nothing.

Destroy in the fight In the 20th century, the confrontation between poles and Ukrainians flowed into another channel. If before that the first massively oppressed the second, then at that moment the situation changed. Ukrainian nationalists began to pursue a policy of terror against poles even before the second World war. That is, when Western Ukraine belonged to Poland. Cooperation with the Nazis added courage and strength to the nationalists. The Nazis, by the way, thought that in this way they would be able to create an independent, but puppet Ukrainian state. And most importantly, this new "power" had to be ethnically pure. Stepan Bandera, like all the other leaders of the nationalists, zealously supported this idea.

In the spring of 1941, the Organization of Ukrainian nationalists gave birth to an instruction called " Fighting the activities of the OUN* during the war." It described in detail the tasks of the" BEZPEKA service " (security) during the armed conflict with the USSR. Simply put, this document stated that elements hostile to Ukraine must be destroyed by any means. And in 1943, the dogs were released from the chain. The head of the "BEZPEKA service" Nikolay Lebed took the initiative to clear the territory of poles. The top OUN (banned in Russia) approved this. Although the oppression of the Polish population both in Volyn and throughout Western Ukraine began much earlier.

Peter Nesterovich was the first to venture. With a subordinate nationalist group, he decided to carve out the Polish village of Parosle (near Vladimirets, Rivne region). And in order to minimize losses among their own, Nesterovich ordered the soldiers to change into the uniforms of Soviet partisans. The fact that the residents of Parola actively cooperate with them, so the trick is not noticed…

Before killing the women, the nationalists raped them, then cut off their noses, ears and Breasts. Men were killed with axes. Two teenage brothers named Gorshkevich, who tried to escape and call for help from the Soviet partisans, were mocked with special cruelty. Their arms and legs were cut off, their stomachs were cut open, and their wounds were covered with salt. Then they were thrown into a field to die. A total of 173 poles were killed in the village, including 43 children. They did not spare even a one-year-old baby. He was pinned to the table with a bayonet… Such a horrible picture I saw of these partisans when he came to Parole. The elite in the UPA detachments* "Rezun" - people whose hobby was cruel executions. Most often, they used saws, knives and axes to execute them. Behind Parole came under attack another Polish village Lipniki. Ivan Litvinchuk's group, better known as Dubovoi, dealt with the local residents. They completely massacred the village, killing 179 poles (51 of them children). By the way, in that locality, was born in the future, the first Polish cosmonaut Miroslav Hermaszewski. At the time of the Ukrainian attack, he was only 2 years old. The fact that Miroslav survived the massacre is a miracle. His mother, trying to escape from his pursuers, hid him in a field among the corpses… Then the population of the village of Kuta and the village of Katarinovka was slaughtered… Moreover, Ukrainian nationalists killed not only poles. But also, as they themselves called them "nedukraintsev", that is, people from mixed marriages. Nationalists treated "apostates" with special cruelty.

And so the black date for the Polish people approached-July 11, 1943. On this day, UPA combat troops simultaneously attacked several dozen villages inhabited mainly by poles (data differ, according to some, there were about a hundred of them, according to others – about 150). They were all killed indiscriminately, because only in this way, according to the nationalists, it was possible to "clear the Ukrainian land".

Polish historians, who were closely engaged in restoring the chronological events in the "Volyn massacre", reported that the UPA fighters, or rather those" Rezun", used 125 ways to kill civilians.

The terror did not stop there. Nationalists began to conduct mass sweeps among the already Ukrainian population. Any person who refused to cooperate or help the UPA was automatically equated with the enemy and executed. As, for example, Ivan Csuchico from the village Klevets'k. Aksyuchits condemned the nationalists ' brutal methods, and paid for it with his life. "Rezun" executed him in public and demonstratively cruelly-sawed in half. And such a death for him was chosen by a tribesman who was a member of the UPA.

The Ukrainian people were outraged. And in order not to aggravate the situation, the nationalists began to exterminate only Ukrainians. As in the village Paltrow. There they "sorted" the population and shot more than three hundred poles with machine guns, while not touching the Ukrainians.

Revenge There is no point in telling about all the atrocities of Ukrainian nationalists. "Volyn massacre" is confirmed by several thousand witnesses and a huge number of photos. Polish researchers talk about more than 36 thousand of their fellow citizens who died then. And these are only those whose identities have been established. Several thousand or even tens of thousands remain unknown. Polish historians mention a figure of 100,000 people, 60,000 of whom are poles (the rest are "apostates"). However, Ukrainian historians and researchers do not agree with this. According to their data, the poles overestimated the real numbers several times. It is clear that such a terror could not remain unanswered. And the poles responded in 1944 with the home Army. They went through Ukrainian settlements scattered across the Eastern part of Poland with fire and sword. But the scale of retribution is not comparable to the"Volyn massacre". In total, about 2-3 thousand Ukrainians died at the hands of Polish soldiers. However, Ukrainian researchers say that in fact, several times more of their fellow citizens were killed than the poles claim. In General, the parties are still unable to agree and reconcile on this issue.

[myukrainianopinion]

"Bandera Passion" angered Poland

In Warsaw, they spoke to Ukraine in the language of ultimatum demands, Poland expressed a strong protest to Kiev because of the glorification of Bandera. On April 8, the Polish Embassy in Ukraine sent a letter to Zurab Alasania, Chairman of the Board of the National Public Broadcasting Company, expressing an official protest over the April 6 broadcast of the UA: First Channel on the Declassified History: Bandera Passion program. The document notes that Polish diplomats were particularly concerned about the idealized image of Bandera, which the guests of the channel tried to create. In Poland, they remember and honor the victims of the Volyn Massacre, which in 1943 was staged by Ukrainian nationalists. “The criminal dimension of the ideology of integral nationalism created by Bandera and its consequences in the form of thousands of brutally murdered inhabitants of the lands of present-day Ukraine of non-Ukrainian origin were missed,” the document says. Relations between Poland and Ukraine in recent years have noticeably deteriorated. The most important claim that exists in Poland to Ukraine concerns, first of all, historical policy. We are talking about attitudes towards Bandera, to what they represented and what was the nature of their actions during the Second World War and after it. Here Warsaw takes a fairly tough position and defends the fact that Bandera carried out the genocide of the Polish population. In February 1943, Ukrainian nationalists began a campaign to destroy the Polish population of Volyn. The culmination of punitive operations reached July 11, 1943, when detachments of the OUN-UPA attacked about 100 Polish settlements. About 100 thousand people, including women, children and old people, became victims. These events are called Volyn Massacre. In 2016, the Polish Parliament established July 11 as the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Genocide committed by Ukrainian nationalists against Polish citizens. Lectures, film screenings, meetings devoted to the tragic fate of the Poles in Volyn are held throughout the country. At the same time, this viewpoint is unacceptable for modern Kiev, which builds its patriotism on the basis of Galician nationalism. Kiev’s refusal to admit the Bandera blame for the genocide of Poles in Western Ukraine caused a sharp political conflict between modern Ukraine and Poland, which is far from exhausted and has not yet reached its peak. Due to the inadequate policy of the current Ukrainian authorities, the old half-forgotten Bandera-Polish conflict became actual Ukrainian-Polish.