Ukrainian Insurgent Army

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, known by its Ukrainian abbreviation UPA, was formally founded on the 14th of October 1942. That date was no accident. It fell on the Feast of the Intercession of the Theotokos, a holy day also celebrated as Ukrainian Cossacks' Day. The choice said everything about what the organization intended to be: a force rooted in Ukrainian history, fighting to resurrect a Ukrainian state that foreign powers had spent decades trying to extinguish.

  The UPA did not fight one enemy. It fought several at once, often simultaneously: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Polish resistance formations. It carried out massacres of Polish civilians that Poland has formally recognized as genocide. It endured Soviet counterinsurgency operations of staggering scale. And it kept fighting, in various forms, until the mid-1950s.

  How did a partisan army hold out for over a decade against the combined resources of the Soviet state? What drove men and women into forests and bunkers when every rational calculation argued for surrender? And how does a force remembered as liberators in one part of Ukraine become a symbol of atrocity in another? Those are the questions this story will try to answer.

• 2. Origins and Structure

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  The first armed group to carry the name Ukrainian Insurgent Army was not the one the world would come to know. Taras Bulba-Borovets formed the Polissian Sich near the town of Olevsk in Volhynia in 1941, shortly after the German-Soviet War began. His original goal was to fight the Bolsheviks while acting independently of German forces. The German command eventually ordered him to dissolve, and the group went underground.

  The organization that would give birth to the lasting UPA was the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, which had split in 1940 into two factions. The more radical faction, known as OUN-B, held a military conference in December 1942 near Lviv. That meeting formally set the course toward building a fighting force. On the 14th of October 1942, armed units in Volhynia and Polesia began operating under the UPA name.

  By November 1943, the UPA had formalized its command structure considerably. Roman Shukhevych took command of the Main Military Headquarters, while Dmytro Hrytsai became chief of staff. The General Staff was organized into departments covering operations, intelligence, logistics, personnel, training, political education, and military inspections.

  The army's social composition reflected its rural roots. Roughly 60 percent of UPA soldiers were peasants of low to moderate means. Workers from the rural lumber and food industries made up another 20 to 25 percent. The remaining 15 percent came from the intelligentsia, and this group supplied a disproportionate share of military trainers and officers.

  In terms of unit structure, the UPA borrowed from the armies surrounding it. Organizational methods came from German, Polish, and Soviet military practice. Training was based on a modified Red Army field manual. The army's largest unit, the kurin, roughly equivalent to a battalion, held between 500 and 700 soldiers. Its smallest unit, the rii, literally meaning bee swarm, held eight to ten fighters. In major operations in Volhynia, three or more kurins would combine into a zahin, a formation roughly equivalent to a brigade.

  Estimating UPA's actual strength was difficult even at the time. A German Abwehr report from November 1943 placed the number at 20,000 soldiers, while other contemporary estimates ran to 40,000. By summer 1944, estimates ranged from 25,000 to 30,000 at the low end, climbing in some assessments to as high as 200,000.

• 3. The War Against Germany

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  At the Third Conference of the OUN, held near Lviv from the 17th to the 21st of February 1943, the organization formally decided to open warfare against the Germans. UPA fighters had already struck a German garrison on the 7th of February, before the decision was even official. On the 20th of March 1943, OUN-B leadership issued secret instructions to its members who had joined the collaborationist Ukrainian Auxiliary Police to desert with their weapons and join UPA units in Volhynia. Between 4,000 and 5,000 trained, armed personnel crossed over in this way.

  German General Ernst August Kostring later described the nature of the UPA's anti-German campaign: UPA fighters, he said, fought almost exclusively against German administrative agencies, the German police, and the SS in their quest to establish an independent Ukraine controlled by neither Moscow nor Germany. The UPA conducted hundreds of raids on police stations and military convoys. In the Zhytomyr region, the German General-Kommissar Leyser estimated the insurgents controlled 80 percent of forests and 60 percent of farmland.

  In June 1943, German SS and police forces under Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who headed Heinrich Himmler's anti-partisan campaign, launched Operation BB against UPA-North in Volhynia. According to Ukrainian accounts, the initial phase of the operation produced no results. Von dem Bach-Zelewski was sent personally to Ukraine to remedy this. He failed. The UPA continued to grow, and German forces were increasingly limited to defensive positions. German propaganda countered by distributing leaflets claiming the insurgents were allies of Moscow.

  From July through September 1943, an estimated 74 clashes occurred between German and UPA forces. German casualties in those engagements were over 3,000 killed or wounded; UPA losses were 1,237. By November 1943, Erich Koch could claim publicly that the nationalist bands in forests posed no major threat, but this was largely for German domestic consumption.

  The relationship shifted dramatically as the Soviet front moved west. In March through July 1944, OUN-B leaders in Galicia negotiated with German SD and SS officials. The result was a German decision to supply UPA with arms and ammunition. By May 1944, OUN-B had instructed its forces to switch the struggle, which had been conducted against the Germans, completely into a struggle against the Soviets. A top-secret memorandum from General-Major Brigadeführer Brenner to SS-Obergruppenführer Hans-Adolf Prützmann confirmed this shift, noting that the UPA had halted all attacks on units of the German army and was sending intelligence agents into Soviet-occupied territory. In the Ivano-Frankivsk region, a small landing strip was constructed for German transport planes.

• 4. The Massacre of Polish Civilians

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  In March 1943, OUN-B leader Mykola Lebed imposed a collective death sentence on all Poles living in the former south-eastern Kresy region of the Second Polish Republic. A few months later, local UPA units were ordered to complete the operation. The UPA commanders behind the decision were Dmytro Klyachkivsky, Vasyl Ivakhov, Ivan Lytvynchuk, and Petro Oliynyk.

  Even Taras Bulba-Borovets, the founder of the original UPA, condemned the campaign as soon as it began. His words were unsparing: "The axe and the flail have gone into motion. Whole families are butchered and hanged, and Polish settlements are set on fire." He warned that England would treat such acts as service to Hitlerite cannibalism, not as honest struggle for freedom.

  The 11th of July 1943, known as Volhynian Bloody Sunday, was among the deadliest single days. On that day, UPA units attacked 99 Polish villages and settlements across three counties: Kovel, Horokhiv, and Volodymyr. The following day, 50 more villages were attacked. Historian Norman Davies described the methods: villages were torched; Roman Catholic priests were axed or crucified; churches were burned with their parishioners inside; throats were cut; pregnant women were bayoneted; children were cut in two.

  In January 1944, the ethnic cleansing expanded to Eastern Galicia. There a degree of difference in practice appeared. Where Volhynian Poles were typically murdered without warning, some Galician Poles were given the choice of fleeing. Ukrainian civilians sometimes joined the violence. In other cases, Ukrainians sheltered their Polish neighbors or vouched that Poles were actually Ukrainian.

  Estimated Polish civilian deaths across Volhynia and Galicia range between 60,000 and 120,000. Polish self-defense units responded by attacking the UPA and its accomplices, with specific orders not to target the general Ukrainian civilian population. Estimates of Ukrainians killed in reprisals range from 2,000 to 30,000. On the 22nd of July 2016, Poland's Sejm passed a resolution formally declaring the massacres genocide.

• 5. The Soviet Counterinsurgency

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  In March 1944, UPA insurgents mortally wounded Army General Nikolai Vatutin, the front commander who had led Soviet forces in the Second Battle of Kiev. Weeks later, an entire NKVD battalion was annihilated by the UPA near Rivne. The Soviets responded with a full-scale operation involving initially 30,000 troops in Volhynia alone.

  In a letter to the State Defense Committee of the USSR, Lavrentiy Beria claimed the spring 1944 clashes resulted in 2,018 UPA fighters killed and 1,570 captured against only 11 Soviet deaths. A captured UPA member quoted in Soviet archives offered a radically different count, claiming reports he received showed 200 UPA fighters killed against 2,000 Soviet losses. Neither figure can be independently verified, and the gap itself reveals the depth of the information war being waged alongside the shooting war.

  By autumn 1944, remaining UPA forces had achieved something remarkable. They enjoyed virtual freedom of movement over an area of 160,000 square kilometers, home to more than 10 million people, and had established a shadow government in parts of that territory. In November 1944, Nikita Khrushchev launched the first of several large-scale Soviet assaults. Soviet archival data from the 9th of October 1944 records one NKVD division, eight NKVD brigades, and an NKVD cavalry regiment, totaling 26,304 soldiers, already stationed in Western Ukraine, with additional units relocating there.

  During the late 1944 and first half of 1945 period, Soviet data claims the UPA suffered approximately 89,000 killed, 91,000 captured, and 39,000 surrendered, against Soviet losses of approximately 12,000 killed, 6,000 wounded, and 2,600 missing. Despite those losses, battalion-size UPA units still controlled and administered large areas of Western Ukraine as late as summer 1945.

  The Soviets also waged war through infiltration. NKVD special groups, known as spetshrupy, were formed from former Soviet partisans who posed as UPA fighters and committed atrocities against Ukrainian civilians, with the aim of discrediting the insurgents. The Security Service of Ukraine later published information that about 150 such special groups, consisting of 1,800 people, operated until 1954. The UPA's own counter-intelligence unit, the Sluzhba Bezpeky, retaliated with its own violence against suspected Soviet informants, which in at least one documented case in the Lviv region involved the killing of entire families before their bodies were mutilated. Due to public outrage, the UPA ceased killing collaborators' families by mid-1945.

  The turning point came in 1947, when Soviet forces shifted strategy from mass terror to patient infiltration. Soviet agents planted inside the UPA began dismantling its leadership networks. In November 1948, those agents killed the heads of the most active UPA network in Western Ukraine and removed the head of the UPA's counter-intelligence unit. On the 5th of March 1950, Roman Shukhevych was killed in an ambush near Lviv. The UPA's last commander, Vasyl Kuk, was captured on the 24th of May 1954.

• 6. Legacy and Recognition

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  John Armstrong, writing about the UPA's long campaign against Soviet rule, placed it in a category of its own. Accounting for duration, geographical extent, and intensity, he called it very probably the most important example of forceful resistance to an established Communist regime before the decade of fierce Afghan resistance beginning in 1979. The Hungarian revolution of 1956 lasted only a few weeks, despite involving a population of nine million. UPA anti-Communist activity, Armstrong wrote, lasted from mid-1944 until 1950.

  In 1992, a memorial to UPA soldiers was erected in the eastern city of Kharkiv, even though the UPA had never operated there. In September 2007, the Communist Party of Ukraine unveiled a counter-memorial in Simferopol, Crimea, dedicated to UPA victims, titled "The Shot in the Back." The commemorative landscape grew more fractured from there, with additional memorials appearing in Luhansk and Svatove, their unveiling ceremonies attended by Russian State Duma deputies and senior Ukrainian politicians from the pro-Russian Party of Regions.

  Efforts at Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation produced some tangible results alongside persistent stalemates. Individual UPA veterans met with Polish veterans and asked for forgiveness. In 1946, the UPA and the post-Home Army Freedom and Independence Association coordinated a joint attack on the city of Hrubieszow. Polish authorities agreed to restore graves and cemeteries in Poland where UPA soldiers were buried. Ukrainian and Polish historians collaborated on a multi-volume history of the two nations. The question of exhumations in Volhynia, however, remained contested between the two governments.

  In March 2019, surviving UPA members were officially granted veteran status by the Ukrainian government, making them eligible for free public transport, subsidized medical services, annual monetary aid, and public utility discounts. Previous attempts to grant that status, particularly during the 2005-2009 presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, had all failed. Yushchenko had submitted a draft law on the 10th of January 2008 that would have extended recognition broadly, but it did not pass.

  On the 5th of March 2021, Ternopil City Council named the largest stadium in the city after Roman Shukhevych. The red-and-black UPA battle flag appeared prominently among Euromaidan protesters years earlier, a reappropriation that scholar Serhy Yekelchyk of the University of Victoria interpreted not as adulation for the wartime insurgents specifically, but as the strongest possible expression of protest against the pro-Russian orientation of the government then in power.

• 7. Music, Film, and Memory

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  The anthem of the UPA was a song called the March of Ukrainian Nationalists, also known by its opening words as "We were born in a great hour." Written by Oles Babiy, it was officially adopted by the OUN leadership in 1932. The organization also drew on an older tradition. The UPA's predecessor body, the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, had used "Chervona Kalyna" as its anthem. Because founding OUN members Yevhen Konovalets and Andriy Melnyk had led the Sich Riflemen, that song passed into UPA use as well.

  The genre of insurgent songs produced around the UPA carries a consistent set of themes: rising against occupying powers, calls to battle and revenge against enemies of Ukraine, love of country, and devotion to revolutionary leaders such as Bandera and Chuprynka. The hard underground life, longing for family, and the heroic deeds of individual soldiers also appear throughout the repertoire.

  Cinema engaged the UPA from multiple national perspectives. Two Czech films by director Frantisek Vlacil, Shadows of the Hot Summer from 1977 and The Little Shepherd Boy from the Valley from 1983, are both set in 1947 and feature UPA guerrillas in significant supporting roles. Ukrainian cinema produced its own body of work, including The Undefeated from 2000, which follows the life of Roman Shukhevych and the efforts of both German and Soviet forces to hunt him down, and The Company of Heroes from 2004, which portrays the everyday life of UPA soldiers fighting against the Polish Home Army.

  The Ukrainian black metal band Drudkh recorded a song titled "Ukrainian Insurgent Army" on their 2006 release Blood in Our Wells, dedicated to Stepan Bandera. The red-and-black flag of the UPA, whose colors its founders described as Ukrainian blood spilled on black Ukrainian earth, continues to appear in public life, carrying with it all the contested meanings that the army's history has accumulated.