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The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Template:Lang-ua) was a guerrilla army formed on October 14, 1942, in Volhynia. The UPA was the military branch of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. The main goal of the UPA was an independent Ukraine. Its leaders were Roman Shukhevych and Stepan Bandera.
The UPA fought a broad spectrum of military forces in the area: the German Wehrmacht, the Polish Armia Krajowa and the Soviet Red Army. After World War II, UPA partisan units continued fighting the Soviet Union and communist Poland until the early 1950s, especially in Carpathian Mountains regions.
The UPA strove to remove Poles from areas that it regarded as indigenously Ukrainian. In the opinion of some historians, the goal pursued by the Ukrainian guerrillas was to destroy the Polish ethnic community in these areas. Most estimates have put the Polish death toll between 80,000 and 100,000 (see Massacre of Poles in Volhynia for more details) and many historians, particularly in Poland, use the term genocide or ethnic cleansing. The extremist authors estimate the number of Polish victims to be as low as 30,000 (Siwicki, Misiło) or ar high as 500,000 (Korman, Prus). These numbers however are not supported by any factual research. Among Poles, UPA is usually being associated with the cruelty of the tortures and the extremely brutal way of murdering its victims.
In early 1944 UPA insurgents ambushed and killed Nikolai Vatutin, the famous commander of the Battle of Kursk, who led the liberation of Kiev. Famous Soviet intelligence agent Nikolai Kuznetsov, Metropolitan Oleksiy (Hromadsky) of the Ukrainian Autonomous Orthodox Church and Polish general Karol Świerczewski were also killed by UPA insurgents.
On the other hand, the UPA's activities are sometimes seen as a response to actions of the inter-war Polish government, which sought to limit the number of Ukrainian institutions in the same areas, often regarded as indigenously Polish. However, the scope of such actions, although unquestionably anti-Ukrainian, was mostly limited to cultural suppression.
During the Soviet years UPA was officially mentioned only in negative terms, and was considered to have been a criminal organisation. After Ukraine gained independence in 1991 former UPA members fought to gain official recognition as legitimate combatants, with the accompanying pensions and benefits due to war veterans. They have also strived to hold parades and commemorations of their own, especially in Western Ukraine. This in turn led to opposition from the Ukrainian veterans of the Red Army, and disapproval from the Russian government. So far attempts to reconcile the two groups of veterans have made little progress. An attempt to hold a joint parade in Kiev in May, 2005 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II proved unsuccessful. The assessment of the historical role of UPA remains a heated issue in Ukrainian society.
See also:
- Massacre of Poles in Volhynia
- 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Galizien (1st Ukrainian)
- Galicia (Central Europe)
- Operation Wisła
- Ukrainian Military Organization, Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
References
- John-Paul Himka, "War Criminality: A Blank Spot in the Collective Memory of the Ukrainian Diaspora", from Significance of the Second World War for establishing of state symbols and collective cultural memory in Central-Eastern Europe, International conference, Lviv, 2003 (also available online at Spaces of Identity, Vol. 5, pp. 9-24, ISSN 1496-6778).
- Norman Davies, "God's playground : a history of Poland : in two volumes", Vol. 2, Chapter 19, Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press, 2005, ISBN 0199253404.
- Wiktor Poliszczuk,, Memory of the Polish Diaspora
- Template:Pl icon Andrzej Sowa, "Stosunki polsko-ukraińskie 1939-1947", Kraków 1998, ISBN 839093158
External links
- UPA - Ukrainian Insurgent Army
- Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Encyclopedia of Ukraine
- Methodics of torture by UPA - an example of a Polish nationalistic article by an unknown author, claiming 500 thousand (!) Polish victims of UPA after Aleksander Korman.