Former Polish Ambassador to Ukraine returns award from Zelenskyy over UPA decision

Bartosz Cichocki returned the order due to the naming of a UAF unit after the Heroes of the UPA. In Poland, this decision was called troubling for bilateral relations.

Former Polish Ambassador to Ukraine Bartosz Cichocki has returned the Ukrainian Order of Merit, which he was awarded in 2022. The reason for this step was the recent decision by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to grant one of the AFU units the honorary title "Heroes of the UPA." This was reported by RMF24, according to UNN.

Details Zelenskyy explained his decision as a desire to restore the historical traditions of the Ukrainian military and to honor the servicemen defending the country's independence. At the same time, the activities of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army remain a subject of sharp dispute in Polish-Ukrainian relations due to the events in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia during World War II.

In his statement, Cichocki noted that he returned the award because of decisions by the Ukrainian authorities which, in his opinion, honor the UPA and individuals associated with collaboration with Nazi Germany. At the same time, the diplomat emphasized that he would continue to support Ukrainians in the fight against Russian aggression, corruption, and historical falsifications.

The decision sparked criticism in Poland The move by the Ukrainian authorities was also criticized by Polish officials. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called it troubling for bilateral relations and something that affects the historical sensitivity of Polish society.

President of Poland Karol Nawrocki stated that the glorification of the UPA indicates Ukraine's unreadiness to share European values regarding historical memory. He also suggested considering the possibility of stripping Volodymyr Zelenskyy of the Order of the White Eagle, which the Ukrainian president was awarded in 2022.

Between 1943 and 1945, the Polish population of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia was subjected to a sustained campaign of mass murder and ethnic cleansing. The killings were planned and carried out chiefly by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the military arm of the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), often with the participation of local Ukrainian villagers. Their goal was the permanent elimination of Poles from territories the nationalist movement intended to incorporate into a future, ethnically homogeneous Ukrainian state.

The campaign was distinguished not only by its scale but also by its extraordinary cruelty. Entire communities were destroyed in coordinated dawn attacks. Victims were killed with axes, scythes, pitchforks, knives, saws, and firearms. Churches and farm buildings crowded with people were set ablaze, and bodies were often mutilated to terrorize survivors and discourage any thought of return. The overwhelming majority of those killed were unarmed civilians: women, children, the elderly, and farming families.

Historians' estimates of the Polish death toll vary, but the most widely cited figures place the total at roughly 100,000 across all affected regions, with approximately 50,000 to 60,000 killed in Volhynia and a further 30,000 to 40,000 in Eastern Galicia and the neighboring southeastern voivodeships.

For centuries, these lands had been home to an intermingled population of Ukrainians (Ruthenians), Poles, Jews, and smaller communities of Czechs, Germans, Armenians, and Russians.

The demographic structure was decisive in shaping what followed. In Volhynia, Ukrainians formed a large rural majority, accounting for around two-thirds of the population, while Poles, at roughly one-sixth, were concentrated in towns, administrative and professional positions, and among landowners and recent agricultural settlers.

In Eastern Galicia, the Polish proportion was larger, and Poles predominated in the cities, above all in Lwów, while Ukrainians dominated the surrounding countryside. The Ukrainian population of Volhynia was largely Orthodox, while that of Galicia was predominantly Greek Catholic (Uniate).

Historical Background:

Following the eighteenth-century partitions of Poland, Galicia fell under Habsburg Austria and Volhynia under Tsarist Russia. Austrian rule, comparatively tolerant of national movements, allowed a Ukrainian national consciousness to develop in Galicia through schools, cooperatives, the Greek Catholic Church, and political parties.

When the Habsburg and Romanov empires collapsed at the end of the First World War, both Poles and Ukrainians laid claim to the same territory. In 1918-1919 the West Ukrainian People's Republic fought the reborn Polish state for control of Eastern Galicia and the city of Lwów, a short, bitter war that the Ukrainians lost.

The Polish-Soviet War that followed ended with the Treaty of Riga in 1921, which confirmed Polish sovereignty over both Eastern Galicia and Volhynia.

Ukrainians in the Second Polish Republic:

The interwar Polish state thus contained a very large Ukrainian minority (several million people) who regarded their incorporation into Poland as a national defeat.

Successive Polish governments treated the borderlands as territory to be secured and integrated, and their policies fed Ukrainian resentment.

In 1930 the authorities conducted a violent 'pacification' of Ukrainian villages in Galicia in response to nationalist sabotage. In 1938 a campaign in the Chełm region and parts of Volhynia demolished or converted well over a hundred Orthodox churches.

Some Polish officials pursued a more conciliatory line (the Volhynian voivode Henryk Józewski, for instance, sought to win over the Ukrainian population). By the late 1930s a significant part of the younger Ukrainian generation had concluded that statehood would come only through force.

Ideological Foundations:

The ideology that drove the massacres was radical Ukrainian nationalism whose chief theorist was Dmytro Dontsov.

In works such as Natsionalizm (1926), Dontsov preached an uncompromising cult of national will, struggle, and self-assertion, explicitly subordinating individual conscience and universal morality to the supreme goal of the nation. He glorified force, denigrated liberalism and humanitarian scruples as weaknesses, and depicted national life as a permanent Darwinian contest. These ideas circulated widely among young Ukrainians embittered by the failures of 1918-1921 and by life as a repressed minority.

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists:

In 1929 these currents were organized into the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), founded in Vienna under the former military commander Yevhen Konovalets. The OUN sought a united, independent Ukrainian state (Soborna Ukraina) and modelled itself on the authoritarian and fascist movements then ascendant in Europe: it was conspiratorial, hierarchical, and committed to 'revolutionary' violence.

Through the 1930s it carried out sabotage and a series of political assassinations, including the killing of the Polish interior minister Bronisław Pieracki in 1934, for which Stepan Bandera was tried and imprisoned. The Doctrine of Ethnic Homogeneity At the heart of OUN thinking lay the slogan 'Ukraine for Ukrainians' and the conviction that a viable Ukrainian state must be ethnically homogeneous.

National minorities (Poles, Jews, and Russians above all) were cast not as fellow inhabitants but as colonizers, exploiters, and obstacles to national liberation. Poles in particular were identified with the hated structures of landholding and state administration in the borderlands. Within this worldview, the removal of these populations was understood not as a crime but as a precondition of statehood.

The Birth of the UPA:

During 1942 the OUN-B began organizing armed units in Volhynia, and in 1943 these coalesced into the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). The new force was decisively strengthened in the spring of 1943, when several thousand Ukrainian auxiliary policemen, men trained and armed by the Germans and in some cases experienced in anti-Jewish actions, deserted en masse and joined the insurgents. The UPA now had the manpower, weapons, and organization to pursue its aims by force. Among those aims, in Volhynia, was the elimination of the Polish presence.

Responsibility for the campaign rested with the Bandera faction of the OUN and its armed wing, the UPA, supported by the movement's security service and, at the local level, by mobilized Ukrainian villagers. Several layers of perpetration can be distinguished.

OUN-B leadership and the political-military command, which set policy and issued orders; and the Security Service (Sluzhba Bezpeky, SB), which enforced discipline, hunted "traitors," and took part in killings.

The UPA itself, the main armed instrument of the massacres in Volhynia, organized into regional commands.

Local self-defense and village detachments (Samooboronni Kushchovi Viddily, SKV), which provided local muscle for attacks on neighboring Polish settlements.

Mobilized Ukrainian peasants, sometimes summoned in large numbers to surround and destroy Polish villages and to share in plunder; their participation gave many massacres the character of communal violence.

Scattered killings of Poles began in Volhynia in late 1942 and early 1943. One of the first large-scale attacks came at Parośla on 9 February 1943, where a UPA unit murdered roughly 150 villagers. Through the spring, as the auxiliary police defected and the UPA grew, the killings widened and became more systematic. In April 1943 some six hundred Poles were murdered at the settlement of Janowa Dolina. By the summer the campaign had become a coordinated, region-wide effort to clear Volhynia of its Polish inhabitants.

The campaign reached its terrible climax on 11 July 1943, remembered as "Bloody Sunday," and the following day. UPA detachments, frequently reinforced by local peasants, attacked dozens of Polish villages simultaneously, by many accounts around ninety-nine localities, in the districts of Włodzimierz, Horochów, Kowel, and Łuck.

The timing was deliberate. Many attacks fell on a Sunday morning and struck congregations gathered for Mass, with churches surrounded and worshippers killed inside or as they fled. The coordinated assault of mid-July 1943 is the single most concentrated atrocity of the campaign and the reason 11 July became the date of national commemoration in Poland.

Methods and Brutality:

Killing was often carried out with farm implements such as axes, scythes, pitchforks, hammers, and saws, as well as with firearms, and victims, including children, were frequently tortured and mutilated. Houses, barns, and churches were burned, sometimes with people locked inside.

Bodies were thrown into wells and pits or left unburied. The aim was not merely to kill but to erase the Polish presence from the landscape and to shatter any expectation that the survivors could ever come back.

Individual massacres convey the scale of particular communities' destruction. In the twin villages of Ostrówki and Wola Ostrowiecka on 30 August 1943, more than a thousand Poles were killed; the dead in Ostrówki alone reportedly included 474 people, among them 204 children. Such episodes were repeated, on varying scales, across hundreds of localities.

Spread to Eastern Galicia, 1944:

As the Soviet front advanced westward in early 1944, the campaign extended into Eastern Galicia, where the larger and more concentrated Polish population was better able to organize self-defense, so that the violence there, while severe, did not reach the proportions seen in Volhynia.

A notorious atrocity of this phase was the destruction of Huta Pieniacka on 28 February 1944, in which soldiers of the 14th Waffen-SS Division "Galizien," together with nationalist forces, killed several hundred Polish villagers.

The Victims:

The victims were overwhelmingly Polish civilians: farming families, women, children, and the elderly, together with Polish clergy, teachers, and officials.

Volhynia accounts for the largest share, commonly given as 50,000 to 60,000 deaths, with a further 30,000 to 40,000 in Eastern Galicia and the southeastern voivodeships. Beyond the dead, hundreds of thousands of Poles were driven from their homes, fleeing to towns, central Poland, or self-defence enclaves.

Poles were not the only victims of the nationalist campaign. Jews who had survived the Holocaust by hiding in the countryside, Czech villagers, and others were also killed. So too were Ukrainians who refused to take part, who warned or sheltered their Polish neighbours, or who lived in mixed Polish-Ukrainian families. The OUN security service treated such people as traitors and killed them, sometimes together with their families. The campaign therefore also claimed Ukrainian lives in the name of enforcing ethnic separation.

The End of the Massacres and the Aftermath:

Under Polish-Soviet population transfer agreements of 1944–1946, roughly 780,000 to 790,000 Poles were moved from Soviet Ukraine to the new, westward-shifted Poland, while Ukrainians were transferred eastward.

In 1947 the Polish authorities carried out Operation Vistula (Akcja Wisła), forcibly resettling about 140,000 Ukrainians and Lemkos from southeastern Poland and dispersing them across the country’s newly acquired western territories in order to destroy the UPA’s base of popular support.

The UPA itself fought a doomed insurgency against Soviet and Polish forces into the early 1950s. Roman Shukhevych was killed in 1950.

The combined effect of the massacres, the war, and the post-war population transfers was the near-total disappearance of the centuries-old Polish presence in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.

A multiethnic borderland was, within a few years, almost entirely unmixed. Its Jewish population had been annihilated in the Holocaust, its Polish population murdered or expelled.

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