Ukrainian Insurgent Army

For the 2022 partisan movement, see Ukrainian resistance during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Not to be confused with Ukrainian People's Revolutionary Army, Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine, or Ukrainian People's Army.

Ukrainian Insurgent Army
Українська повстанська армія
Leaders
Dates of operation
  • 14 October 1942–1949
  • 1949–1956 (localized)
Active regions
Ideology
Size20,000–200,000 (estimated) [citation needed]
Part ofOrganization of Ukrainian Nationalists–Bandera faction
Allies
Opponents

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainian: Українська повстанська армія, УПА, romanized: Ukrayins'ka Povstans'ka Armiia, abbreviated UPA) was a Ukrainian nationalist paramilitary and partisan formation founded by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists on 14 October 1942.[1] During World War II, it was engaged in guerrilla warfare against Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union,[2] and both the Polish Underground State and Polish Communists.[3] It conducted the massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.

The goal of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was to drive out occupying powers in a national revolution and set up an independent government headed by a dictator; OUN accepted violence as a political tool against enemies of their cause.[4] In order to achieve this goal, a number of partisan units were formed, merged into a single structure in the form of the UPA,[nb 1] which was created on 14 October 1942. From February 1943, the organization fought against the Germans in Volhynia and Polesia.[12] At the same time, its forces fought an evenly matched war against the Polish resistance,[13] during which the UPA carried out massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia,[14] resulting in between 50,000 and 100,000 deaths.[15][16][17] Soviet NKVD units fought against the UPA, which led armed resistance against Soviets until 1949. On the territory of Communist Poland, the UPA tried to prevent the forced deportation of Ukrainians from western Galicia to the Soviet Union until 1947.[13]

The UPA was a decentralized movement widespread throughout Ukraine, divided into three operational regions; each region followed a somewhat different agenda, given the circumstances of a constantly moving front line and a double threat from Soviet and Nazi opponents.[18] The UPA was formally disbanded in early September 1949, but some of its units continued operations until late 1956. Officially, the UPA's last military engagement occurred in October 1956, when remnants of the group fought on the Hungarian border region in support of that country's revolution.[19] In March 2019, surviving UPA members were officially granted the status of veterans by the government of Ukraine.[20]

  1. ^ Arad, Yitzhak; Arad, Yitzchak (2010). In the Shadow of the Red Banner: Soviet Jews in the War Against Nazi Germany. Gefen Publishing House Ltd. p. 189. ISBN 978-965-229-487-6. The first UPA unit was officially established on October 14, 1942. …The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainska Povstanska Armia-UPA) was an arm of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Orhanizatsia Ukrainskikh Nationalistiv – OUN).
  2. ^ Kondor, Katherine; Littler, Mark (2023). The Routledge Handbook of Far-Right Extremism in Europe. Taylor & Francis. p. 22. ISBN 978-1-000-89703-6.
  3. ^ Rudling, Per A. (2011). "The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths". The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies (2107). p. 14. doi:10.5195/cbp.2011.164. While anti-German sentiments were widespread, according to captured activists, at the time of the Third Extraordinary Congress of the OUN(b), held in August 1943, its anti-German declarations were intended to mobilize support against the Soviets, and stayed mostly on the paper.
  4. ^ Myroslav Yurkevich, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Orhanizatsiia ukrainskykh natsionalistiv) This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).
  5. ^ Snyder, Timothy (2004). The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999. Yale University Press. p. 143. ISBN 978-0-300-10586-5. The OUN was an illegal, conspirational, and terrorist organization bound to destroy the status quo. The OUN counted on German help ... Germany was the only possible ally.
  6. ^ Katchanovski, Ivan (2013). "The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and the Nazi Genocide in Ukraine". Paper Presented at the "Collaboration in Eastern Europe During World War II and the Holocaust" Conference, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust MemorialMuseum & Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies. The OUN and the UPA can both be classified as terrorist organizations because their actions correspond to academic definitions of terrorism as the use of violence against civilians by non-state actors in order to intimidate and to achieve political goals.
  7. ^ Delphine, Bechtel (2013). The Holocaust in Ukraine – New Sources and Perspectives – The 1941 pogroms as represented in Western Ukrainian historiography and memorial culture (PDF). United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. pp. 3, 6. Some Ukrainian immigrant circles in Canada, the United States, and Germany had been active for decades in trying to suppress the topic and reacted to any testimony about Ukrainian anti-Jewish violence with virulent diatribes against what they dismissed as 'Jewish propaganda' ... the Ukrainian Insurrectional Army (UPA), which was responsible for ethnic 'cleansing' actions against Poles and Jews in Volhynia and Galicia.
  8. ^ Plokhy, Serhii (2015). The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. New York: Basic Books. p. 320. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which had close to 100,000 soldiers at its height in the summer of 1944, was fighting behind the Soviet lines, disrupting Red Army communications and attacking units farther from the front ... Among the UPA's major successes was the killing of a leading Soviet commander, General Nikolai Vatutin. On 29 February 1944, UPA fighters ambushed and wounded Vatutin as he was returning from a meeting with subordinates in Rivne, the former capital of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. He died in Kyiv in mid-April. Khrushchev, who attended Vatutin's funeral, buried his friend in the government center of Kyiv ... not all the UPA fighters shared the nationalist ideology or belonged to the OUN.
  9. ^ Friedman, Philip; Friedman, Ada June (1980). Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust. New York: Conference on Jewish Social Studies: Jewish Publication Society of America. p. 179. ISBN 978-0-8276-0170-3 – via Internet Archive. After the outbreak of World War II, the Germans constantly favored the OUN, at the expense of more moderate Ukrainian groups. The extremist Ukrainian nationalist groups then launched a campaign of vilification against moderate leaders, accusing them of various misdeeds ... As early as the spring of 1940, a central Ukrainian committee was organized in Cracow under the chairmanship of Volodimir Kubiovitch ... Shortly before the outbreak of Russo-German hostilities, the Germans, through Colonel Erwin Stolze, of the Abwehr, conducted negotiations with both OUN leaders, Melnyk and Bandera, requesting that they engage in underground activities in the rear of the Soviet armies in the Ukraine.
  10. ^ Piotrowski, Tadeusz (1998). Poland's Holocaust. McFarland. pp. 224, 233, 234. ISBN 978-0-7864-0371-4 – via Internet Archive. ... after the massive exodus of the Polish people created a hiatus in the flow of requisitions, the Germans decided to stop the UPA terrorist attacks against civilians ... These anti-Jewish actions were carried out by the members of the Ukrainian police who eventually joined the UPA ... By October (1944), all of Eastern Poland lay in Soviet hands. As the German army began its withdrawal, the UPA began to attack its rearguard and seize its equipment. The Germans reacted with raids on UPA positions. On July 15, 1944, the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (Ukrainska Holovna Vyzvolna Rada, or UHVR, an OUN-B outfit) was formed and, at the end of that month, signed an agreement with the Germans for a unified front against the Soviet threat. This ended the UPA attacks as well as the German countermeasures. In exchange for diversionary activities in the rear of the Soviet front, Germans began providing the Ukrainian underground with supplies, arms, and training materials.
  11. ^ Katchanovski, Ivan (2015). "Terrorists or national heroes? Politics and perceptions of the OUN and the UPA in Ukraine". Communist and Post-Communist Studies – Paper Prepared for Presentation at the Annual Conference of the Canadian Political Science Association, Montreal, June 1–3, 2010. 48 (2–3): 15. doi:10.1016/j.postcomstud.2015.06.006. ISSN 0967-067X. However, historical studies and archival documents show that the OUN relied on terrorism and collaborated with Nazi Germany in the beginning of World War II. The OUN-B (Stepan Bandera faction) by means of its control over the UPA masterminded a campaign of ethnic cleansing of Poles in Volhynia during the war and mounted an anti-Soviet terror campaign in Western Ukraine after the war. These nationalist organizations, based mostly in Western Ukraine, primarily, in Galicia, were also involved in mass murder of Jews during World War II. The 2009 Kyiv International Institute of Sociology survey shows that only minorities of the residents of Ukraine have favorable views of the OUN-B and the UPA and deny involvement of these organizations in mass murders of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews in the 1940s.
  12. ^ Piotrowski, Tadeusz (1998). Poland's holocaust. Internet Archive. McFarland. p. 234. ISBN 978-0-7864-0371-4. By October (1944), all of Eastern Poland lay in Soviet hands. As the German army began its withdrawal, the UPA began to attack its rearguard and seize its equipment. The Germans reacted with raids on UPA positions. On July 15, 1944, the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (Ukrainska Holovna Vyzvolna Rada, or UHVR, an OUN-B outfit) was formed and, at the end of that month, signed an agreement with the Germans for a unified front against the Soviet threat. This ended the UPA attacks as well as the German countermeasures. In exchange for diversionary activities in the rear of the Soviet front, Germans began providing the Ukrainian underground with supplies, arms, and training materials
  13. ^ a b Timothy Snyder. The reconstruction of nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999. Yale University Press. 2003. pp. 175–178.
  14. ^ "Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian anti-hero glorified following the Russian invasion". Le Monde. 12 January 2023. Retrieved 1 May 2024.
  15. ^ Motyka, Grzegorz (2016). "Czy zbrodnia wołyńsko-galicyjska 1943–1945 była ludobójstwem". Rocznik Polsko-Niemiecki / Deutsch-Polnisches Jahrbuch (in Polish). 2 (24): 45–71. doi:10.35757/RPN.2016.24.15. ISSN 1230-4360.
  16. ^ Aleksander V. Prusin. Ethnic Cleansing: Poles from Western Ukraine. In: Matthew J. Gibney, Randall Hansen. Immigration and asylum: from 1900 to the present. Vol. 1. ABC-CLIO. 2005. pp. 204–205.
  17. ^ Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe. "The Ukrainian National Revolution" of 1941. Discourse and Practice of a Fascist Movement. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. Vol. 12/No. 1 (Winter 2011). p. 83.
  18. ^ Snyder, Timothy (2012). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books.
  19. ^ Logusz, Michael O. (1997). Galicia Division: The Waffen-SS 14th Grenadier Division 1943–1945. p. 49.
  20. ^ Cite error: The named reference veteransUK38171U was invoked but never defined (see the help page).


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