The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) waged a guerrilla war against the Soviet Union in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and southwestern regions of the Byelorussian SSR during and after World War II. With the Red Army’s successful counteroffensive against the Nazi Germany and their invasion into western Ukraine in July 1944, UPA resisted the Red Army's advancement with full-scale guerrilla war, holding up 200,000 Soviet soldiers, particularly in the countryside, and was supplying intelligence to the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst (SD) security service.
One major UPA victory against the Soviet Union was the killing of a high ranking Soviet General Nikolai Vatutin. According to Soviet documents during the conflict, a total of 153,000 people were killed, 134,000 arrested, and 203,000 deported by the Soviet authorities, mostly in the years 1944–1945. At the same time, OUN-UPA killed 30,676 people in the years 1944–1953, and 8,340 of them were soldiers. UHVR claimed that UPA killed 35,000 Soviet state security officers from 1945 to January 1951 and Lt. Gen. Moskolenko in 1948, with CIA covert operations chief Frank Wisner estimating the same figure.
Background
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was established in 1929 by radical nationalists and holding a prominent role fascists, that advocated for an independent, ethnically cleansed, homogenous totalitarian state with all other political parties banned. Prior to World War II, the extreme OUN was smaller and less influential among the minority Ukrainians in Poland than the moderate Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance. The OUN, which emulated the Nazi's organizational system, closely collaborated with other fascist states and movements, particularly in Germany but also in Italy, Japan, Romania, and Spain, many were Nazi agents. Ukrainian nationalism was formed under the influence of such political theorists as Dmytro Dontsov's political thought, characterised by a need for totalitarianism, national chauvinism, and also antisemitism, as well as Mykola Stsiborskyi and Yevhen Onatsky, and Italian fascism and German Nazism. Before the war, the OUN regarded the Second Polish Republic as an immediate target, but even then it viewed the Soviet Union, although not operating on its territory, as the main enemy and greatest oppressor of the Ukrainian people. Even before the war, impressed by the successes of fascism, OUN radicalised its stance, and it saw Nazi Germany as its main ally in the fight for independence.
From the very beginning there was a strong division within the OUN between the young and old groups. The group of older activists was born around 1890 and experienced the service of fighting during World War I and later for Ukrainian independence, they were also active in the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO), while the younger activists were born later and grew up in independent Poland. The young were much more radical, calling for the use of terror in political struggle, but both groups were united by national radicalism and advocacy of a totalitarian system. The leader of the old group Andriy Melnyk claimed in a letter sent to the German minister of foreign affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop on 2 May 1939 that the OUN was "ideologically akin to similar movements in Europe, especially to National Socialism in Germany and Fascism in Italy".
OUN's terrorist methods, fascination with fascism, rejection of parliamentary democracy and acting against Poland on behalf of Germany did not find support among many other Ukrainian organizations, especially among the Petliurites, i.e. former activists of the Ukrainian People's Republic. In the course of the war, with the approaching defeat of Nazi Germany, the OUN-B changed, at least in official statements, its political image. It moved away from fascist symbolism and totalitarianism toward democratic slogans. OUN's denials of its role in the Holocaust began in 1943 after it became obvious that Germany would lose the war. The whitewashing continued after the war, with OUN's propaganda describing its legacy as a "heroic Ukrainian resistance against the Nazis and the Communists".
Outbreak of the war
Before 1939, Ukrainian territories were split between Poland, the Soviet Union, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. The invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany on 1 September 1939 was followed by the Soviet invasion on 17 September that captured the eastern provinces (Kresy) of the Second Polish Republic. On 1 November 1939, Polish territories annexed by the Soviet Union (i.e. Volhynia and Eastern Galicia) were incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Initially, the Soviet occupation was met with limited support from the ethnic Ukrainian population. Repression was directed mainly against the ethnic Poles, and the Ukrainization of education, land reform, and other changes were popular among the Ukrainians. The situation changed in the middle of 1940 when Soviet collectivization began and repressions hit the Ukrainian population. There were 2,779 Ukrainians arrested in 1939, 15,024 in 1940, and 5,500 in 1941, until the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
The situation for ethnic Ukrainians under German occupation was much better. About 550,000 Ukrainians lived in the General Government in German-occupied Poland, and they were favoured at the expense of Poles. Approximately 20 thousand Ukrainian activists escaped from the Soviet occupation to Warsaw or Kraków. In late 1939, Nazi Germany accommodated OUN leaders in the city of Kraków, the capital of the General Government and provided a financial support for the OUN. The headquarters of the Ukrainian Central Committee headed by Volodymyr Kubijovyč, the legal representation of the Ukrainian community in the Nazi zone, were also located in Kraków.
Creation of OUN-B, pogroms, and anti-Soviet uprising
On 10 February 1940 in Kraków, a revolutionary faction of the OUN emerged, called the OUN-R or, after its leader Stepan Bandera, the OUN-B (Banderites). This was opposed by the current leadership of the organization, so it split, and the old group was called OUN-M after the leader Andriy Melnyk (Melnykites). The OUN-M dominated Ukrainian emigration and the Bukovina; in Ukraine itself, the Banderists gained a decisive advantage (60% of the agent network in Volhynia and 80% in Eastern Galicia).
The OUN-B was more radical and already in 1940 began preparations for an anti-Soviet uprising. However, Soviet repression delayed these plans and more serious fighting did not occur until after the German invasion of the USSR in July 1941. According to OUN-B reports, they then had about 20,000 men grouped in 3,300 locations in Western Ukraine. In addition, Ukrainian Nachtigall and Roland battalions were formed under German command and numbered about 800 men. The NKVD was determined to liquidate the Ukrainian underground, according to Soviet reports 4435 members were arrested between October 1939 and December 1940. There were public trials and death sentences were carried out. In the first half of 1941, 3073 families (11329 people) of members of the Polish and Ukrainian underground were deported from Eastern Galicia and Volhynia. Soviet repression forced about a thousand members of the Ukrainian underground to take up partisan activities even before the German invasion.
The OUN seized about 213 villages and organized diversion in the rear of the Red Army. In the process, it lost 2,100 soldiers and 900 were wounded. OUN's anti-Semitism was influenced by Nazi Germany but the organization also had its own, independent anti-Semitic tradition. The OUN-B formed Ukrainian People's Militsiya that, displaying exceptional cruelty, carried out at least 58 documented antisemitic pogroms and massacres of Jews that claimed between 13,000 and 35,000 lives. The biggest pogroms carried out by the Ukrainian nationalists took place in Lviv resulting in the massacre of 6,000 Jews. The involvement of OUN-B is unclear but certainly OUN-B propaganda fuelled antisemitism. The vast majority of pogroms carried out by the Banderites occurred in Eastern Galicia and Volhynia. After the German capture of Lviv in 1941, the OUN leadership declared the Act of restoration of the Ukrainian state; however, Adolf Hitler was opposed to Ukrainian statehood, having set his sights on the ruthless economic exploitation of the newly acquired territories. OUN was banned, Bandera was arrested on July 5 and placed under house arrest in Berlin. The OUN-B went underground and encouraged its members and supporters to join the German administration and especially the auxiliary police.
Following the German army, they managed to extend their network into eastern Ukraine; their slogans did not find support among the local population. The OUN-M on the other hand acted openly and took over local governments in western Ukraine, including Lviv. OUN-B fought OUN-M, going so far as to murder its members. In late 1941 and early 1942, the Germans started to fight the influence of OUN-M by arresting its members, so they also went underground. Another group was the so-called Polissian Sich formed by Taras Bulba Borovets, who referred to the traditions of the Ukrainian People's Republic. After the German attack he occupied and controlled Sarny and Olevsk, formed an alliance with the Germans and fought the Soviet remnants as police chief. In November 1941, he was forced to disband his unit (which at that time numbered about 2,000–3,000 people) after the Germans wanted to limit his independence and he refused to participate in the liquidation of the Jews. Even after that, the power of the occupation administration over the territory of Polesia was mostly limited to cities, railway stations, and roads. The countryside turned into an arena of brutal confrontation between several guerrillas armies.
Mass executions of Jews began in the autumn of 1941 on German-occupied territories and continued in the second half of 1942 when the Germans began liquidating Jewish ghettos. Some Ukrainian auxiliary policemen took part in these executions. From 1942, the local non-Jewish population also became targets of repression. The Germans began to deport the population en masse to the Reich for forced labour and to demand large supplies from the farmers. For their refusal, the Germans began to punish the population with executions and pacifications of Ukrainian and Polish villages. The Ukrainian auxiliary police also took part in the pacification actions, but the mood of rebellion was growing in their ranks. As a result, partisan units reappeared in Western Ukraine, including Soviet ones and the first Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) formed by Taras Bulba-Borovets. Bulba-Borovets went into active combat in April 1942, mainly against the Germans; the group entered into a neutrality agreement with the Soviet partisans. In December 1942, he proposed to the Melnykites and Banderites to join forces with him as commander-in-chief. The OUN-B rejected the proposal, but the OUN-M, who had already begun to form their own units, accepted the offer.
Creation of UPA, anti-German uprising, and extermination of Poles
In October 1942 OUN-B decided to form its own partisans, called OUN Military Detachments. Individual units entered active combat in February 1943 (first was sotnia of Hryhoriy Perehinyak attack on German police station in Volodymyrets on 7 February). At the third OUN-B conference (17-23 February 1943) it was decided to launch an anti-German uprising in order to liberate as much territory as possible before the arrival of the Red Army. The uprising was to break out first in Volhynia, for which purpose the formation of a partisan army called the Ukrainian Liberation Army began there. The uprising broke out in mid-March, with Dmytro Klyachkivsky and Vasyl Ivakhiv leading it, and Klyachkivsky alone after Ivakhiv death in May that year. It was also at that time that the name given to it was abandoned and the name Ukrainian Insurgent Army, taken over from Bulba-Borovets, began to be used, thus impersonating it. The new army basis were Ukrainian policemen, who deserted en masse (about 5 000) between March and April 1943. By July 1943, the UPA had 20,000 soldiers. Even before the anti-German uprising started, OUN-B units started to attack Polish villages and murder Poles. This soon turned into a full-scale extermination campaign, aimed at killing off or driving out the Polish population from areas considered by OUN-B to be Ukrainian. The main target of UPA's ethnic cleansing were Poles, mainly women and children, but they also killed other ethnic minorities such as Jews, Czechs, Hungarians, Armenians, and even many Ukrainians. UPA fighters used mainly farm tools such as scythes, knives and pitchforks to commit their murders of civilians.