Some things are better off staying buried. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a presidential decree on May 26 bestowing the honourary title of “Heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army”, or UPA, on an elite unit within the nation’s special forces.
As the armed wing of the far-right Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), the UPA carved out a gruesome name for itself in the shifting borderlands between Poland and Ukraine during World War II.
It remains infamous in Poland for its role in the massacres of ethnic Poles and Jews in Volhynia and eastern Galicia – massacres that Polish historians believe killed tens of thousands civilians, and that the Polish state considers part of a deliberate campaign of genocide.
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Zelensky’s decree was all the more striking for having the uneasy makings of a pattern. The day before, the Jewish president had presided over the reburial of the repatriated remains of Andriy Melnyk in the national military ceremony near Kyiv.
Melnyk, who died in Germany in 1964 and had been buried in Luxembourg, was the leader of a branch of the OUN – and a staunch advocate for collaboration between the Ukrainian nationalist movement and Nazi Germany and its fascist allies.
Melnyk now lies buried with full state honours alongside Ukrainian soldiers killed during the four-year struggle against the Russian invasion, hailed as a national hero by the same Zelensky who once spoke proudly of his own grandfather’s fight against the genocidal Nazi regime in the ranks of the Red Army.
Under strain
The president’s actions have been met with shock across the border in Poland.
Former Polish president Lech Walesa, who had led the Solidarity trade union movement that brought down the Soviet-backed Communist government in Poland at the close of the Cold War, said on social media that he had wrenched the Ukrainian flag badge from his chest upon hearing of the decree. While he said he would continue to support Ukraine’s fight against Moscow, he would not – could not – support its president.
Left-wing former prime minister Leszek Miller described the decree as akin to Germany renaming a military unit after the Nazis’ Einsatzgruppen death squads.
And conservative President Karol Nawrocki called for the Ukrainian president to be stripped of the Order of the White Eagle, the nation’s highest state honour that was bestowed on Zelensky by Nawrocki’s predecessor Andrzej Duda in the wake of the Russian onslaught.
"Glorifying the UPA has provided Russian propaganda with plenty of fuel for disinformation," he said. Russian President Vladimir Putin has long justified his assault on Ukraine in part as a campaign to "de-Nazify" the country.
An open wound
The legacy of the fierce partisan fighting between Polish and Ukrainian forces remains an open wound between the two countries.
Anita Prazmowska, emeritus professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, said that the roots of the conflict could be traced back at least to Polish independence in the wake of the First World War.
Following the collapse of the German, Russian and Habsburg Empires that had carved the country up between them, a newly independent Poland drove back an advance by the nascent Soviet Union and staked out territories that included a substantial Ukrainian minority in the eastern borderlands.
“During the inter-war period, the attitude of the new Polish state towards the Ukrainian minority was profoundly negative,” Prazmowska said. “Essentially, the attitude was that Ukrainians are not mature enough to form a state, that they are Slavs, yet not [Slavs] – essentially, that they should be incorporated in the Polish state.”
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As Nazi and Soviet troops poured into Poland in 1939 under the terms of their non-aggression pact, many Ukrainian nationalists who had long fought a clandestine fight for independence became willing collaborators with the Nazis.
The twin wings of the OUN, led by Melnyk and his more radical rival Stepan Bandera, saw Hitler’s Third Reich as a force powerful enough to prise an independent Ukrainian state from Moscow and Warsaw – one swept clean of Jews, Poles and Russians.
“During the Second World War, Nazi Germany made use of the Ukrainian nationalists as foreign levies, and therefore exploited the very strong desire for independence in the Ukrainian community to draw them into policing – and policing the ghettos in particular,” Prazmowska said.
“Later, the levies who were brought into the Waffen-SS were brought in to [deal with] the [1944] Warsaw Uprising, where they distinguished themselves with their extreme brutality.”
'A defiant gesture'
Founded by the OUN after Hitler’s forces stormed into the Soviet Union, the UPA variously fought against Soviet, Nazi and Polish Resistance forces as it became clear that an independent Ukraine had no place in the Fuhrer’s plans to cleanse Eastern Europe for a new generation of German colonists.
As the Red Army drove the Nazi war machine back, the UPA launched a desperate campaign to cleanse the borderlands of their Polish communities – what Warsaw now describes as a genocide.
“Zelensky ... honoured certain people who had been involved in those activities – elevating them to positions of Ukrainian nationalists, Ukrainian heroes,” Prazmowska said. “And that's not how the Poles see them.”
This is not the history of the UPA as it is understood in much of Ukraine.
Lesia Bidochko, a senior lecturer at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, said that Zelensky’s actions fit into the country’s efforts to forge a common narrative of the country’s long march towards independence.
“From a historical standpoint, some of the figures being heroized in contemporary Ukraine are genuinely contested. Their significance is less historical than symbolic – most people simply do not engage deeply with the history itself,” she said. “What matters to many people is that these figures annoy Russia. They serve as a defiant gesture. This emotional and political significance often overshadows the more detailed aspects of historical record.”
Ukraine’s now four-year struggle against Russia’s advance has sharpened nationalist appetites for the public celebration of figures who fought for the country’s independence – though sometimes under the same blood-and-soil banner that unleashed some of the worst horrors of the twentieth century.
“There is a demand within parts of Ukrainian society for a rehabilitation of historical memory,” Bidochko said. “Ukrainian authorities have been responsive to that demand – unofficially framing it within a decolonisation discourse.”
'The first step'
With Ukraine still struggling to mobilise the troops it needs to the front despite widening conscription, the idea that Zelensky would extend further support to an intensely motivated – and ideologically hardline – minority within the country might make some sense.
The far-right Azov movement, which has steadily grown in influence throughout parts of Ukraine's military since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion, has campaigned heavily for the public rehabilitation of ultranationalist figures.
Whatever the reasoning, Melnyk will likely not be the last of his nationalist compatriots to find his way back to his native soil.
The remains of OUN leader Yevgen Konovalets, who was killed by a Soviet agent in Rotterdam in 1938, will also be brought back to Ukraine for burial. Local media has also reported that Kyiv is campaigning for the return of Bandera, buried in a Munich grave.
"Now is only the first step," Zelensky said during the ceremony.
"I am grateful to every person who worked so that return of great Ukrainian figures could happen and so that the Ukrainian people would receive their pantheon of heroes," he added.
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