1953: Dmytro Bilinchuk, Company 67 of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army

ExecutedToday.com ^ | June 24, 2008 | Headsman

[CheshireTheCat]

On this date in 1953, a guerrilla with the nom de guerre “Khmara” was shot in Kiev’s Lukianivka Prison for his involvement in a still-controversial resistance movement.

History is lived forward but understood backward. Therein lies the ambiguity of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a nationalist organization that operated in Galicia and environs after the Nazi invasion and persisted several years afterwards.

At its height, the UPA is said to have had up to 100,000 members, famously operating out of subterranean forest bunkers. This day’s victim was the captain of one of its companies; there is very little about him available online in English — principally his death date — but Ukrainian sites add the folklorish but poignant detail of his supposed adoption of an orphaned bear cub.

But about his organization, the name alone is sufficient to invite the most acrimonious debate:* were these partisans Nazi collaborators? Ukrainian patriots? Both?

Ukrainian nationalists, under the leadership of a man who had abandoned socialism for a fascist national ideology (everyone was doing it), entered the World War II era having conspicuously failed to grasp independence in a period when nationhood was being handed out like candy to small European states....

[Chewbarkah]

Obscure but interesting. Now connect UPA to Burisma.

[pierrem15]

The UPA was a truly nasty group. They butchered so many ethnic Poles in western Ukraine that local Polish Home Army units sought a truce with the Wehrmacht and asked for assistance against the UPA.

[pierrem15]

I was in Lviv (Lvov) a few years ago. Contemporary Ukrainians tend to minimize the atrocities of the UPA as Soviet propaganda, although the Poles certainly haven't forgotten.

There were two attempts to form an independent Ukraine in the first half of the 20th century, the first was a Ukrainian Soviet at the end of WWI independent of Lenin's Reds. It was crushed in in the East by the Red Army and in the West by the Poles. The second was in WWII allied with Germany.