Historian Mirosław Szumiło, a professor at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, eastern Poland, said the Ukrainian Insurgent Army first targeted Poles and only later became chiefly associated with resistance to Soviet rule.
The comments come after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky granted one of Ukraine’s military units the honorary name "Heroes of the UPA," a decision that drew sharp criticism in Poland.
The UPA was the armed wing of the faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) associated with Stepan Bandera, a radical nationalist leader.
In Poland, the formation is chiefly remembered for the massacres of Polish civilians in the Volhynia and Eastern Galicia regions during World War II.
Szumiło said it was difficult to accept the argument that the UPA should be viewed primarily as an anti-Soviet independence movement.
"When the UPA began operating in practice, in 1943, its number-one enemy was the Poles," he said. "The UPA is today called a national liberation army in Ukraine, but it took on that character only after 1945, when the territories of today’s western Ukraine again came under Soviet occupation and the Soviets really became the enemy."
He said the UPA did sometimes carry out armed operations against German targets, including attacks on German posts. But in the summer of 1943 in Volhynia, he added, it focused on what Ukrainian nationalists called "anti-Polish action," meaning the killing of Poles.
A similar campaign was carried out in 1944 in Eastern Galicia, then part of German-occupied Poland. In spring 1944, violence also spread to the Lublin and Rzeszów regions.
There, Szumiło said, the situation took on more of the character of a Polish-Ukrainian war, as Polish underground units, including the Home Army (AK) and Peasant Battalions (BCh), carried out retaliatory operations.
Between 100,000 and 120,000 Poles were killed in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.
Szumiło said 100,000 remains the most likely figure and has long been used in Polish historiography.
He said the UPA was the main perpetrator, although other Ukrainian formations, including units serving Nazi Germany, also took part in crimes against Poles.
Szumiło acknowledged that the UPA’s postwar activity against the Soviet authorities could be compared with the Polish anti-communist underground.
By the late 1950s, UPA members had killed more than 8,000 Soviet soldiers and officials. But he said that later period could not erase what came before.
"This is a chain of events, and we Poles cannot accept attempts to pass over the crimes of 1943 and 1944 in silence by speaking only about the fight against the Soviets," Szumiło said.
He argued that the two stages of UPA activity cannot be separated because they involved the same formation, rooted in prewar Ukrainian nationalism and the insurgent activity of the OUN in the Second Polish Republic, Poland’s interwar state.
"The point is to assess the whole formation, which was criminal," he said. "You cannot create two legends of the UPA, a bad one and a good one, because that leads to a situation in which Ukraine remembers only the second, anti-Soviet part, while in Poland we remember the first, genocidal one. And these two stages of the UPA are inseparable."
Szumiło said the UPA’s political program was based on ethnic cleansing. Some historians argue that the original plan was to expel Poles from areas claimed for a future Ukrainian state. In practice, he said, it ended in murder.
He also stressed that thousands of Ukrainians helped Poles during the massacres. Some historians estimate their number at around 30,000, some of whom were killed by the UPA for refusing to support its policy.
Szumiło said Ukraine had other traditions it could draw on while building its modern identity, including the "Heavenly Hundred," the protesters killed during the 2014 Maidan uprising, and figures from Ukraine’s struggle against Bolshevik Russia in 1917-1920.
He pointed in particular to Symon Petliura, who allied with Poland against Bolshevik Russia, though his reputation remains controversial in western Ukraine because the alliance involved giving up claims to Volhynia and Galicia.
"He was simply a realist," Szumiło said. "He knew there was no other way and that Ukraine had to rely on Poland, because Russia is the common enemy of Ukraine and Poland. Today we refer to that tradition."
The renewed controversy comes at a sensitive moment in Polish-Ukrainian relations.
Poland has been one of Kyiv’s main supporters since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but disputes over wartime history continue to strain ties.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk has described Zelensky’s decision as troubling.
Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz called it unacceptable, while Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski warned that Russia would benefit most from the historical dispute between Warsaw and Kyiv.
Polish President Karol Nawrocki said last Friday that he would seek to strip Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest state honor, which was awarded to him in 2023 by then-President Andrzej Duda.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha on Wednesday called for restraint and dialogue in relations with Poland, saying that rising tensions between the two neighbours benefit neither side and warning against inflaming historical disputes while Russia remains a common threat.
The Polish foreign ministry said last week it viewed the move "unequivocally negatively."
(gs)
Source: IAR, PAP