The “Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists” (OUN) and its armed wing, the “Ukrainian Insurgent Army” (UPA), were recently glorified at the state level by Zelensky to the horror of all Poles who remember the role of these Nazi collaborators in the Volhynia Genocide that massacred of over 100,000 of their people. Since then, Ukrainian activists and their Western allies have coordinated an unprecedented anti-Polish infowar campaign on social media defending the OUN-UPA as “anti-imperialists”, which is a flat-out lie.
Their fight against the Soviets – which are portrayed by Ukrainians, Poles, and most Westerners as imperialists – and falling out of favor with the Nazis is overshadowed by their proto-fascist ideology whose explicitly declared goal of an ethnically pure Ukraine even preceded Hitler’s rise to power. Interestingly, they were first patronized by Weimar Germany during the decade of tensions with Poland that only ended with their 1934 Non-Aggression Treaty, which came a year after the Polish-Soviet one.
The OUN claimed that the lands of “Old (‘Kievan’) Rus” that were settled by Poles beginning in the early 14th century under Kazimierz the Great, notably the only Polish leader to be given that appellation, and thus became an integral part of Polish Civilization were “colonized”. While it’s true that Poles and Ukrainians didn’t always get along, and the Commonwealth and interwar Second Polish Republic could have promulgated some better policies towards Ukrainians, their alleged plight is exaggerated.
The vast majority of Poles who lived in what’s nowadays Ukraine for so many centuries that they can legitimately be considered indigenous were peasants, not nobles, and they too experienced much of the hardships that their Ukrainian counterparts did. While they could freely practice their Catholic faith and conduct their studies in Polish, unlike the Ukrainians who at times had restrictions placed upon the practice of Orthodoxy and use of Ukrainian, they didn’t enforce the aforesaid on their neighbors.
Importantly, Poles never genocided Ukrainians either, unlike how the Ukrainians genocided their Polish neighbors three times during Khmelnitsky’s Uprising in the mid-17th century, the “Koliszczyzna” a century later, and of course the Volhynia Genocide during World War II. In fact, Poland fought side-by-side with the Ukrainians against the Bolsheviks shortly after World War I, but most of what’s today’s Ukraine was recaptured by the Bolsheviks due to not enough Ukrainians participating in this joint endeavor.
As for the interwar Second Polish Republic’s brief “pacification” campaign of what was then known as Eastern Lesser Poland that the OUN never tires of bringing up, it was bloodless, unlike the OUN’s terrorist-separatist insurgency throughout the 1930s that targeted officials and civilians. The most notable respective victims were Interior Minister Bronisław Pieracki and activist Tadeusz Hołówko, who advocated for Polish-Ukrainian friendship, thus threatening the OUN’s ethno-extremist agenda.
In pursuit of that self-same agenda pertaining to an ethnically pure Ukraine, the OUN staged a full-scale uprising in mid-September 1939 to facilitate the Nazis’ invasion, after which they genocided their Polish neighbors in the region several years later in a massacre that also targeted anti-genocidal Ukrainians. The most infamous slaughter by far was what’s known as Bloody Sunday, when the UPA targeted over 150 Polish villages while the locals were at church, inside which many were disemboweled or burned alive.
No matter how much some nowadays might approve of the OUN falling out with the Nazis near the end of the war and fighting against the Soviets, that in no way whatsoever absolves them of the Volhynia Genocide, which cannot be defended or justified on faux “anti-imperialist” grounds. Far from fighting supposed interwar “Polish imperialism”, which didn’t exist despite the Soviet-era narrative that’s recently gaining traction among “Non-Russian Pro-Russians”, the OUN actually embodied Ukrainian imperialism.
No Ukrainian grievances against the interwar Polish government justify the brutal mass murder of over 100,000 neighboring Polish peasants, most victims of whom were women and children, the fact of which Ukraine doesn’t want the world to know and is why it won’t allow all of their remains to be exhumed and properly buried. The genocide that the OUN-UPA committed was an indisputable manifestation of imperialism much worse than that which many Western Europeans committed across the Global South.
The local Poles therefore weren’t the imperialists, the local Ukrainians were, so the roles of victim and villain are maliciously being reversed to perversely justify the extermination of an entire people on a faux “anti-imperialist” pretext that no decent person anywhere in the world would ever defend. Therefore, support for the OUN-UPA is actually support for one of the most brutal forms of imperialism in the modern era, not a form of virtue signaling “anti-imperialism” like the ongoing infowar campaign implies.
