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11:20 14.07.2026 •
The current spat between Poland and Ukraine began in late May, after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky awarded the honorary title "In Honor of the Heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army" (UPA; designated extremist and banned in Russia) to a unit of the Ukrainian army’s special operations forces. In Poland, UPA members are rightfully blamed for the 1943-1945 Volhynia massacres, which claimed the lives of an estimated 100,000 Poles. Warsaw responded by stripping President Zelensky of Poland’s highest award, the Order of the White Eagle. Zelensky sent the order back, and in a series of mutual affronts, a number of Ukrainian and Polish politicians likewise gave up their previously awarded Polish and Ukrainian distinctions. Furthermore, officials on both sides of the border exchanged a series of verbal stabs against each other.
What really happened in Volhynia in the summer of 1943, and why do the echoes of those events remain a dark and bloody stain on the history of Polish-Ukrainian relations?
In Poland, July 11 is Remembrance Day for the victims of the genocide perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists against the country’s citizens. On this day, militants from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which officially gave rise to the UPA, attacked approximately 100 to 150 settlements in German-occupied Western Ukraine inhabited by ethnic Poles as part of the Volhynia Massacre. The crimes committed by nationalists on this day are the most well known, although atrocities later committed by OUN-UPA militants were equally widespread.
In an interview with RT, Alexander Dyukov, director of the Historical Memory Foundation, said that in 1938, even before the start of World War II, the OUN drew up a military program that called for bloody ethnic cleansing of Polish nationals living in what is now Western Ukraine.
"These ideas were supposed to be implemented in 1939 – during the early stages of World War II, the Nazis planned to use Ukrainian nationalists to exterminate Polish intellectuals and Jews in Western Ukraine. However, this plan was effectively cancelled after the USSR and Germany signed a Non-Aggression Pact and an additional protocol, which made Western Ukraine part of the Soviet Union.”
In 1941, the nationalists issued a new document, “The Struggle and Activities of the OUN during the War,” which laid out the course of action for OUN fighters following the German attack on the Soviet Union. Among other things, the plan also mentioned an ethnic cleansing of Poles.
"True, the Ukrainian nationalists planned to kill them after their massacre of the Jews. Similar plans can be found in other OUN documents. Therefore, we have every reason to say that the Volhynia massacre was no accident. It was a systematically planned crime," Alexander Dyukov explained.
He recalled that the first mass-scale attacks and killings came in January-February 1943. "From that moment on, we can describe it as the start of the Volhynia massacre, and July 11 is a symbolic date used in modern Poland. Perhaps the attacks that happened on that day are simply better known, but mass killings had been going on before that, and continued later. The extermination of Polish civilians did not slow down with the onset of summer - on the contrary, it only intensified. In short, July 11 is a formal date; it doesn't reflect the full scale of the tragedy of the Volhynia massacre," the historian concluded.
The actual number of victims of the Volhynia massacre is one of the biggest sticking points in the debates between Polish and Ukrainian historians. Many Polish researchers settle on 50,000 to 60,000 Poles killed, while the scale of the Polish military's retaliatory actions is estimated at 2,000–3,000 Ukrainian civilians. A joint commission of Polish and Ukrainian historians set up in the late-1990s to address those events failed to reach a consensus. In 2003, on the 60th anniversary of the tragedy, Ukrainian and Polish presidents Leonid Kuchma and Aleksander Kwasniewski issued a joint statement "On Reconciliation on the 60th Anniversary of the Tragic Events in Volyn," in which they deplored the confrontation between the two peoples. Warsaw and Kyiv never managed to reconcile, though. In June 2016, the Polish parliament commemorated "the victims of the genocide committed by Ukrainian nationalists against the citizens of the Second Polish Republic in 1939–1945." That same year, Polish movie director Wojciech Smarzowski made "Volyn" – a feature film, which depicts the tragedy so frankly and horrifyingly that it was immediately banned from release in Ukraine.
Without going into chilling details, we will mention just this: the UPA units included so-called "rezuns" – cutthroats, who specialized in brutal executions using axes, knives and saws. Polish historians, studying the "Volhynia massacre," have counted some 125 methods of killing used by those "rezuns."
Today's Poland cannot forget these events, no matter how much "friendship" it has with Ukraine. Moreover, official Kyiv considers those sadistic "rezuns" as true-blue national heroes, whose examples should inspire the younger generation. The cult of Bandera will remain the foundation of Ukrainian state policy until the country's leadership changes. Leszek Miller, former Polish Prime Minister (2001-2004), stated this on the Polsat television channel.
"As long as Bandera's followers rule Ukraine, nothing will change, because protecting the good names of [Stepan] Bandera, [Roman] Shukhevych, and other bandits is a state duty," Miller noted. "Only when this government leaves or is overthrown, and people come to power who have a different attitude toward their painful past, only then can we seriously consider reconciliation, completing the process, and exhuming [the victims of the Volyn massacre]," he added.
Furthermore, the former Polish prime minister explained why the full-scale reburial of Wehrmacht soldiers is underway in Ukraine, while the exhumation of the victims of the Volyn massacre is stalled. "There is only one answer to this question. "The remains of German soldiers show signs of combat and battlefield damage. <…> But the remains of the murdered Poles are the bones of women, children, children's skulls with nails driven into them, and chopped and mutilated bones. And this is what the Ukrainians don't want to show the world," Miller said.
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Based on publications by RT, “Argumenty I Fakty,” “Kommersant” and the Russian Foreign Ministry.
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