Twenty-seven years — from the founding of the OUN in Vienna in 1929 to the arrest of the last brigadier general Vasyl Kuk on 23 May 1954 — the Ukrainian nationalists waged the longest partisan war of the 20th century. They fought against three empires at once: the Polish Second Republic, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The UPA never had a rear or a front, never had foreign backing, never had a chance — and yet it held out in the Carpathian forests and the Volhynian bunkers for fully ten years after the capitulation of Berlin. On its bones, on the tragedy of Volhynia of 1943, on the deportations of Operation Vistula of 1947, modern Ukrainian identity has grown — and still divides the nation and its neighbours.
Interwar Galicia: under Polish rule
By the Treaty of Riga of 1921 Western Ukraine — Galicia and Volhynia — entered the restored Polish state. Some five million Ukrainians lived there, and Warsaw at once pursued towards them a policy of assimilation: it closed Ukrainian schools, banned Ukrainian place-names, settled Polish "osadnik" veterans on the best lands. The Ukrainian language was driven out of state institutions; the autonomy of Galicia promised by the League of Nations was never granted.
In the autumn of 1930 the government of Józef Piłsudski carried out the so-called Pacification: detachments of Polish police and army entered more than 450 Ukrainian villages, broke furniture, destroyed stores, publicly beat men and priests. About 30 people were killed, thousands maimed. The Pacification finally convinced a whole generation of young Galicians: the legal road did not work — what was needed was a revolution.
Vienna, January 1929: the birth of the OUN
From 28 January to 3 February 1929, in the Hotel Imperial in Vienna, the First Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists took place. Several emigre organisations of veterans of the national liberation struggle of 1917—1921 were united, and the new Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was headed by Colonel Yevhen Konovalets of the Army of the Ukrainian People's Republic, formerly commander of the Sich Riflemen. The slogan was: "You will gain a Ukrainian state or perish in the struggle for it."
The ideology of the OUN was defined as integral nationalism — a synthesis of the ideas of Italian fascism, the German "Conservative Revolution" and the native Ukrainian tradition of Dmytro Dontsov with his cult of will and action. The OUN rejected parliamentarism and democracy as "weakness"; it set as its goal a total struggle for the state by every available means, terrorism included. At the turn of the 1930s this was the most radical and the most disciplined Ukrainian political force.
Rotterdam, 23 May 1938: the candy for the colonel
The Soviet Kremlin understood the danger of the OUN early. In 1937 Stalin personally entrusted the head of the foreign department of the NKVD, Pavel Sudoplatov, with the operation to liquidate Konovalets. A young Ukrainian from Melitopol, posing as the son of an old comrade-in-arms of the colonel, had spent several years winning the confidence of the OUN leadership — and was receiving personal commissions from Konovalets's own hand.
On 23 May 1938 in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Sudoplatov handed the colonel a box of chocolates with a bomb built into it. A few minutes after Konovalets had walked out of the Café Atlanta, the explosion tore him to pieces in the Coolsingel street. Moscow celebrated — and the OUN entered the worst crisis of its existence.
The split of 1940: Bandera against Melnyk
After the death of Konovalets the leadership of the OUN passed to his son-in-law — the moderate Andriy Melnyk, a colonel, a contemporary of Konovalets, a man of the old school. But the younger generation, the veterans of the Polish prisons — above all Stepan Bandera (1909—1959), released from a Polish prison after the German attack on Poland in September 1939 — demanded more radical action and rejected the authority of Melnyk.
In February 1940 in Krakow, Bandera and his supporters held the Second Grand Assembly of the OUN and elected their own leadership. The split became final: from now on there existed the OUN(b) — revolutionary, of Bandera — and the OUN(m) — of Melnyk. This was not merely a clash of personalities but a clash of generations and styles: terror against politics, action against propaganda. The Ukrainian nationalist cause lost its unity for ever.
The Decalogue of the Ukrainian Nationalist
Already in 1929, in parallel with the founding of the OUN, the young student of philosophy from Lviv Stepan Lenkavsky drew up a text that became the inner moral code of the organisation — the Decalogue of the Ukrainian Nationalist. Ten commandments, written short, like soldiers' oaths, set out the ethics of the new man: "You will gain a Ukrainian State, or perish in the struggle for it"; "You will let no one stain the glory or honour of your Nation"; "Remember the great days of our Wars of Liberation."
The Decalogue was deliberately set against the Ten Commandments of Moses: it put the nation in the place of God, and struggle in the place of rest. Many of its propositions — commandments seven, nine and ten on the attitude towards enemies — would later become the source of sharp criticism, especially in connection with the events in Volhynia. But for the generation of the 1930s the Decalogue was an ethical manifesto — and the thousands of young men and women who learned it by heart carried that ethic into the forests of the war.
September 1939: out of the underground
The outbreak of the Second World War found Bandera in the Polish prison of Brest. He was serving a life sentence for organising the murder of the Polish Minister of the Interior Bronisław Pieracki in June 1934; the death sentence of the Warsaw trial of 1936 had been commuted to imprisonment for life. On 13 September 1939, when the Germans were already at the gates of Brest, the Polish guards abandoned the prison — and Bandera, with hundreds of other political prisoners, walked out free.
He travelled on foot across Western Ukraine, by then occupied by the Red Army, crossed the San and ended up in the General Government in Krakow. There, in the rear of the Nazi Wehrmacht, the OUN began to prepare for the main gamble of its life: when Hitler attacks Stalin, it was decided in Krakow, we shall enter Ukraine together with the Wehrmacht — and proclaim an independent state, presenting Berlin with an accomplished fact.
Lviv, 30 June 1941: the Act of Restoration of the Ukrainian State
On the fifth day of the war with the USSR, on 30 June 1941, the Bandera marching battalion "Nachtigall" entered Lviv on the heels of the German units. That same evening in the building of the Prosvita society on the Market Square, the Ukrainian National Assembly was convened. Bandera's deputy Yaroslav Stetsko (1912—1986) proclaimed the Act of Restoration of the Ukrainian State — and himself its prime minister.
The text of the Act was short and unequivocal: "By the will of the Ukrainian People… the Ukrainian State is restored, for which whole generations of the finest sons of Ukraine have laid down their heads." Words about an "alliance with National Socialist Germany" were there too — they hoped to make Berlin the guarantor of independence. But Hitler already had his own plan for Ukraine: Lebensraum, not an ally. Berlin reacted at once.
Sachsenhausen: the OUN leaders behind the wire
Already on 5 July 1941 the Gestapo arrested Bandera in Krakow; a week later, on 9 July, Stetsko was arrested in Lviv. Both were offered the chance to revoke the Act of 30 June — both refused. The investigation went on for more than a year, and in January 1942 they were transferred to the special "Zellenbau" block of the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen outside Berlin — where also sat the British marshal Stuart Mentell, the leader of the "White Rose" Kurt Schumacher and Stalin's nephew Yakov Dzhugashvili.
Bandera spent three and a half years in Sachsenhausen — until September 1944, when the Wehrmacht was already in retreat, and Himmler was desperately trying to turn the Ukrainian nationalists into allies against the Red Army. Two of his brothers, Oleksandr and Vasyl, the Nazis tortured to death in Auschwitz in 1942. This fact — that the main leader of the OUN sat in a Nazi concentration camp through the whole time of the sharpest events of 1942—1944 — would later become the key argument in the historical debates about Volhynia.
The Polissian Sich: Otaman Bulba
The first armed unit that officially called itself the "Ukrainian Insurgent Army" arose not from the OUN but on the initiative of the self-taught otaman Taras Bulba-Borovets (1908—1981). Born in Volhynia, in the interwar years a poet and a political prisoner of Polish jails, in June 1941 he raised in Polissia a detachment of local peasants to fight the remnants of the Red Army that had scattered into the forests.
Bulba-Borovets named his formation the "Polissian Sich" — on the model of the Zaporozhian tradition, with elected officers, Cossack ranks and a blue-and-yellow banner. In the summer of 1941 the Polissian Sich numbered several thousand fighters and in fact controlled deep Volhynia. In the autumn the Germans dissolved it, but the otaman disappeared into the forests, and in 1942 created the UPA — Polissian Sich, which lasted until 1943, when it was absorbed by the Bandera UPA.
14 October 1942: the formal founding of the UPA
14 October 1942 — the day modern Ukraine marks as the Defender of Ukraine Day. On this date, by the decision of the Leadership of the OUN(b), in the village of Perehinske in Volhynia, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army was officially set up to unite all the Bandera armed groups. The first commander was the young soldier Dmytro Klyachkivsky (1911—1945) with the pseudonym "Klym Savur".
The date of 14 October was not chosen by chance — it is the Feast of the Protection of the Most Holy Mother of God, the traditional festival of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, which symbolised heavenly cover over the host. In this way the OUN deliberately wrote the UPA into the thousand-year tradition of Ukrainian armed resistance: Kievan Rus, the principality of Galicia-Volhynia, the Zaporozhian Sich, the Army of the Ukrainian People's Republic — and now the UPA. The slogan "Freedom for Ukraine or death" was not a rhetorical figure.
Structure: kuren, sotnia, a thousand machine guns
The UPA was built on the classic insurgent model, with regard for the history of the Cossacks and its own fighting reality. The whole territory was divided into three regional commands: UPA-North (Volhynia and Polissia, commander Klym Savur), UPA-West (Galicia, the Zakerzonnia) and UPA-South (Podolia, the Kamianets region). Each was subordinate to the General Command — first Klym Savur, then Shukhevych.
The basic tactical units were the kuren (the equivalent of a battalion, 200—400 men) and the sotnia (the equivalent of a company, 100—150 men). As in the Zaporozhian Sich, ranks and posts bore Cossack names: kurinnyi, sotennyi, chotovyi, roiovyi. At its peak, in 1944, the UPA numbered, by various estimates, from 30 to 100 thousand fighters; the armament was mainly captured German and Soviet. Rare for a partisan war — over a thousand machine guns.
Klym Savur: commander of UPA-North
Dmytro Klyachkivsky — pseudonym "Klym Savur," after Colonel Klyment Savur of the Army of the Ukrainian People's Republic — was born on 4 November 1911 in Zbarazh in Galicia, into the family of a railway worker. In 1934 he graduated from the law faculty of Lviv University; from 1937 he served on the leadership of the OUN. In 1939 he was thrown into a Soviet prison in Brest; in 1941 together with Bandera he walked free during the retreat of the Red Army.
In the autumn of 1942 Klyachkivsky took the head of the newly created UPA; a year later he became commander of UPA-North. It was under his command that the tragedy of Volhynia of 1943 took place, and it is his orders, as executor of the will of the OUN Leadership, that will long remain the subject of historical discussion. He fell in battle with NKVD troops on 12 February 1945 in the village of Lisy, near Zhukiv in the Rivne region — at the age of 33.
Volhynia, 11 July 1943: Bloody Sunday
The most tragic and most painful episode in the whole history of the UPA — the Volhynian events of 1943. In the spring and summer of 1943, against the background of the collapse of the German administration and the approach of the front, individual sotnias of UPA-North under the command of Klym Savur began a systematic ethnic cleansing of the Polish civilian population of Volhynia. The climax came on 11 July 1943, the so-called Bloody Sunday: a simultaneous, coordinated attack on around 100 Polish villages, mainly during Sunday Mass.
Modern academic historiography — the Ukrainian and Polish scholars Volodymyr Viatrovych, Grzegorz Motyka, Timothy Snyder — diverges on the details, but agrees on the scale: from 50 to 100 thousand Poles perished in Volhynia and Galicia, and in the retaliatory actions of the Polish underground — from 10 to 20 thousand Ukrainians. Poland in 2016 officially recognised the events as a genocide; Ukraine does not accept this qualification, emphasising the spiral of mutual violence under occupation. The debate continues to this day.
August 1943: the Third Extraordinary Grand Assembly of the OUN(b)
Against the background of the bloody events in Volhynia, in August 1943 in the forests near Ternopil the Third Extraordinary Grand Assembly of the OUN(b) was convened. At it the new leadership — Shukhevych, Lebed, Kuk — carried through a fundamental ideological reorientation. The integral nationalism of 1929 officially gave way to a democratic platform: equal rights for national minorities, freedom of religion, parliamentarism, social justice for workers and peasants were all recognised.
The resolutions of 1943 testified: the OUN was learning. The bloody errors at the start of the war — the alliance with the Nazis by which individual leaders had been guided — were being thought through again; the future Ukrainian state was conceived as a democracy of the European type. This document would long serve as the inner legitimation of the movement and, later, of the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada, the United States and Great Britain, which would explain through it its anti-totalitarian principles in the years of the Cold War.
The war on three fronts: against all
The uniqueness of the UPA lay in this — that it fought against three enemies at once. Against the Wehrmacht and the SS — for a Ukraine without German masters; the sharpest battles were fought in 1943 in Volhynia, where the UPA shattered several German punitive expeditions. Against the Red Army and the NKVD — for a Ukraine without Stalin; this front would become the chief one from 1944 onwards.
And, finally, against the Polish Home Army and other Polish detachments — for Ukrainian Volhynia and the Zakerzonnia. This third front was the most tragic and the most complicated: two enslaved nations, which ought to have been allies against the common occupiers, in the whirl of war and mutual enmity built up since 1921, exterminated each other. None of her enemies had the smallest chance of winning the UPA over to its side: the idea of an Independent Sovereign United Ukrainian State was absolute.
The wounding of Vatutin: 29 February 1944
On 29 February 1944, on the road between Hosha and Myliatyn in the Rivne region, the convoy of the commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front, General Nikolai Vatutin, ran into an ambush of a UPA detachment under the command of the sotnia commander "Zelenyi." Vatutin — who already had behind him the battles for Kiev and the Korsun-Shevchenkivsky pocket — was severely wounded in the thigh. A fight broke out; the UPA fell back, and the general was carried off to a hospital in Kiev.
At first the wound did not seem mortal. But gangrene set in; on 15 April 1944 Vatutin died in his 43rd year. His death became the greatest single named success of the UPA in the whole war and a shock for the Soviet high command — a general of equal rank with Zhukov and Konev had been killed by Ukrainian bandits, as the Soviet press called them. But this same wound was the beginning of the end: against the destruction of the UPA, Stalin threw the best units of the NKVD.
Hurby, April 1944: the largest battle of the UPA
From 21 to 25 April 1944 in the Kremenets forests in Volhynia the Battle of Hurby blazed up — the largest and most ferocious battle in the history of the UPA. About 5 thousand fighters of two kurens of UPA-North — "Dorosh" and "Eney" — fell into encirclement by an NKVD internal-troops formation many tens of thousands strong, reinforced by artillery, tanks and aircraft. The Soviet side set itself the goal of the total destruction of the insurgent forces in the region.
The fighting went on for five days and nights without a break. The UPA lost, by various estimates, from 500 to 1500 fighters, but escaped destruction: the kurens broke out of the encirclement, breaking through the ring on the night of 25—26 April, carrying off their wounded and their weapons. Hurby proved that the UPA was no petty band but an organised partisan army able to hold a defence against regular forces. The battle entered the song-folklore of Volhynia, and the modern memorial each year on 25 April gathers thousands of pilgrims.
The UHVR, July 1944: a parliament in the forest
From 11 to 15 July 1944, in a forest near the village of Sprynia in the Sambir region, the constituent assembly of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR) took place — an underground political representation which was to become the legitimate government for the UPA and for the whole resistance movement. As president was elected the professor of agronomy Kyrylo Osmak (1890—1960), born in the Poltava region, a prisoner of the Soviet camps in 1928—1934. The head of the General Secretariat became Roman Shukhevych.
The UHVR was a deliberate attempt to show the Allies — Great Britain and the United States — that the Ukrainian resistance movement had a political superstructure, democratic principles, and was not reduced to the OUN(b) alone. In the platform — all those propositions of the Third Assembly of 1943: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, parliamentarism, the rights of minorities. Soon afterwards Osmak was seized by the Chekists; until 1960 he sat in the Vladimir prison, where he also died. The UHVR continued its work in exile, becoming the chief voice of the emigration right up to the 1990s.
Summer 1944: the start of the war against Moscow
By the summer of 1944 the Red Army had wholly cleared Western Ukraine of the Germans. In place of one occupation came another — and it is now that the main war of the UPA begins, the war that will last fully ten years more. Stalin could not be reconciled with the fact that in his rear, among the freshly "reunited" lands, an organised armed force continued to exist that rejected his authority.
Against the UPA were thrown the 1st and 2nd Divisions of the NKVD internal troops, separate units of "SMERSH," destruction battalions raised from the local activists. In 1944—1945 on the territory of Western Ukraine more than 500 thousand Soviet troops fought against the UPA. The tactics were combined: large Chekist-military operations, mass deportation of the families of insurgents to Siberia (from 1944 to 1953 more than 200 thousand persons were deported), agent penetration, fake "bunker" detachments of the NKVD posing as the UPA.
12 February 1945: the death of Klym Savur
By the beginning of 1945, UPA-North — the strongest insurgent grouping — still held the front in Volhynia, although the Germans had long retreated far to the west. Klym Savur, the commander of UPA-North, moved from one bunker to another, constantly changing the location of his headquarters to avoid the special operations of the NKVD.
On 12 February 1945 a group of seven fighters with Klym Savur at their head left a forest camp near the village of Lisy (now in the Hoshcha district of the Rivne region). On the outskirts of the hamlet of Stary Zhukiv, in the drifts of wet February snow, an ambush of three hundred fighters of the 65th regiment of NKVD frontier troops awaited them, brought there by an informer. The battle went on for several hours; Klym Savur was shot down by a machine gun and died at the age of 33. The command of UPA-North passed to Colonel "Yaryi" (Petro Oliynyk).
The great raids: Lemkivshchyna, Kholmshchyna, the Zakerzonnia
From 1945 the UPA began systematic great raids westwards — into the Ukrainian ethnic lands outside the Ukrainian SSR. The Lemkivshchyna, the Nadsyannia, the Kholmshchyna, the Podlasie — territories which by the Yalta agreements had ended up within the borders of the new Communist Poland, but had a Ukrainian majority or a substantial minority — received in the UPA the collective name of the Zakerzonnia (after the Curzon Line).
The kurens of "Burlaka," "Zaliznyak," "Prut," "Khrin" and "Hromenko" crossed the San and the Bug, joined up with the local Ukrainian underground, and through 1945—1947 waged against the Polish army and the Security Office a fierce partisan war in the Carpathians and the Beskids. This was perhaps the only place in Europe where the war did not end in May 1945: machine guns did not fall silent for fully three years more.
28 March 1947: the death of General Świerczewski
On 28 March 1947, on a mountain road between Baligród and Cisna in the Polish Beskids, the convoy of the Deputy Minister of National Defence of Poland, General Karol Świerczewski, ran into an ambush. Świerczewski — a hero of the Spanish Civil War, commander of the Jarosław Dąbrowski Brigade, a man of legend among Polish Communists — was inspecting operations against the UPA in the Lemkivshchyna. He did not survive.
The ambush was set by fighters of the UPA under the command of the sotnia commanders "Khrin" (Stepan Stebelsky) and "Stakh" (Volodymyr Shchyhelsky). The blow was prepared to perfection: fire from 30 metres, the general dead on the spot. For the Polish authorities this death became a convenient pretext for an already planned final solution of the "Ukrainian question" in the new Poland. A week later the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers' Party took the decision on Operation Vistula.
Operation Vistula: April—July 1947
From 28 April through July 1947 Communist Poland carried out Operation Vistula — the mass deportation of the whole Ukrainian and Lemko population from the Zakerzonnia to the territories of former East Prussia and northern Poland. The aim was to deprive the UPA of its social base at a single stroke. Against the UPA acted the "Operational Group Vistula" — about 20 thousand Polish servicemen, who encircled the Ukrainian villages one after another.
In three months about 150 thousand persons were evicted — Ukrainians, Lemkos, Boykos — in goods wagons, with resettlement in the Polish voivodeships far from their native land, one family to a village, in order to make it impossible for the community to preserve itself. About 4 thousand "suspect" persons — peasants, intellectuals, simply young people — were thrown into the special concentration camp at Jaworzno in Silesia, where they were tortured, starved and killed without trial. The Ukrainian ethnos of the Zakerzonnia ceased to exist for ever.
The raid to the West: Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany
After the start of Operation Vistula further struggle of the UPA in the Zakerzonnia became impossible. In the autumn of 1947 the command took an unprecedented decision: to break through to the West, through Czechoslovakia and Austria into the American zone of occupation in Germany, to inform the Western Allies in person of the fate of the Ukrainian resistance movement. The sotnias of "Khrin," "Burlaka" and "Hromenko" — about 500 fighters — set off on the longest partisan march of 20th-century Europe.
Through the Slovak Tatras and the Austrian Alps, breaking through every line of defence of the Czechoslovak army and the Soviet frontier guards, losing fighters in ambushes, but stubbornly going on, in September 1947 — May 1948 about 120 insurgents reached the American zone in Bavaria and surrendered to the Allies. Most ended up in the displaced persons' camp at Regensburg; so to the West came the first documented wave of witnesses about the reality of the "Soviet paradise." "Khrin" himself was killed in a Polish ambush in the Tatras on 10 September 1949.
The losses of 1949: Hasyn and Khrin
1949 became the heaviest year for the command staff of the UPA in the whole war. On 31 January 1949, in a bunker near Lviv, in a firefight with an operational group of the MGB, Colonel Oleksa Hasyn — "Lytsar" — chief of the General Military Staff of the UPA, closest comrade of Shukhevych, the man who worked out the strategy of all the great raids — was killed. He was only 38 years old.
And on 10 September 1949 in the Polish Tatras the trap closed on "Khrin" — Stepan Stebelsky, the legendary commander of the Zakerzonnia, victor of the ambush on Świerczewski, veteran of the great march of 1947—1948. He had been on his way back from the West through Czechoslovakia on a mission to inform the underground; he was shot down by a Polish frontier guard in the fight. The loss of two such commanders in a single year broke the back of the UPA. Only Shukhevych remained — and he already knew his own time was running out.
Bilohorshcha, 5 March 1950: the death of Shukhevych
Roman Shukhevych (1907—1950) — pseudonym "Taras Chuprynka," brigadier general of the UPA, supreme commander from 1944, head of the General Secretariat of the UHVR — was sheltering in various safe flats in Lviv and the region, redeploying every few weeks. By 1950 there remained around him only the narrowest circle — a handful of liaison men and bodyguards. The MGB had been hunting him for six years.
At dawn on 5 March 1950 in the Lviv suburb of Bilohorshcha, in the house of Anna Khrobak, an MGB operational group under the command of Major General Pavel Sudoplatov — the same man who had killed Konovalets in Rotterdam — closed in. Shukhevych fired back with a pistol and would not surrender; according to different versions, he was either shot down or laid hands on himself with his last cartridge. He had reached the age of 42. The command of the UPA was taken up by Colonel Vasyl Kuk.
23 May 1954: the arrest of Vasyl Kuk
The last supreme commander of the UPA was Vasyl Kuk — "Lemish" (1913—2007) — a native of Galicia, a veteran of the OUN since 1929, brigadier general, member of the leadership of the OUN(b). After the death of Shukhevych he hid for several years in bunkers and safe flats of the Lviv region, trying to preserve the remnants of the organisational network — though he himself understood that the partisan war was already lost.
On 23 May 1954 in the village of Drahobysh in the Lviv region the KGB took him alive. Kuk went through interrogations of many hours, refused to cooperate, received a sentence of imprisonment for life. In 1960 he was released — supposedly "pardoned" — and allowed to live in Kiev under strict surveillance. He lived until 2007, lived to see the independence of Ukraine, gave hundreds of interviews to young historians. The day of his arrest — 23 May 1954 — is taken as the symbolic end of the UPA as an organised force.
Munich, 15 October 1959: cyanide for Bandera
Stepan Bandera, after his release from Sachsenhausen in September 1944, never returned to Ukraine: he lived in the American zone of West Germany and headed the Foreign Sections of the OUN. In Munich at Kreittmayrstrasse 7 he had a modest flat, where he lived under the assumed name Stefan Popel with his wife Yaroslava and their three children. The KGB had been hunting him since 1947: Stalin, and then Khrushchev, regarded Bandera as the chief symbol of the Ukrainian anti-Soviet movement.
The executor was the young agent Bohdan Stashinsky, a Ukrainian from Lviv, recruited by the KGB as early as 1950. On 15 October 1959 at four in the afternoon he met Bandera on the staircase and shot him in the face with a special pistol with an ampoule of liquid cyanide. Stashinsky vanished, returned to the GDR; Bandera died within five minutes, at the age of 50. Two years later Stashinsky fled to the West, gave himself up to the German police, and at the noisy trial of 1962 told the story of the murder — and so exposed the whole western network of the KGB.
The legacy: from a ban to the Maidan
In the USSR the mere mention of the UPA was forbidden; for a flag with the trident a man got a camp sentence, for the "Decalogue" the article of "anti-Soviet propaganda." After 1991 a slow rehabilitation began: first in Galicia, then across the whole country. In 2015 the Verkhovna Rada passed the law on the legal status of participants in the struggle for the independence of Ukraine in the 20th century — the UPA was officially recognised as a belligerent party.
The legacy of the UPA remains to this day the subject of sharp dispute — especially with Poland over Volhynia, where the official recognitions of genocide in 2016 tear at bilateral relations. But inside Ukraine itself, beginning with the Euromaidan of 2013—2014, the symbols of the UPA — the red-and-black flag, the slogan "Glory to Ukraine — Glory to the Heroes!", the portraits of Shukhevych and Bandera — have become generally accepted. In the Russo-Ukrainian War from 2022, when Ukraine fights once more against Moscow, the soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine wear shoulder patches with the trident and phrases from the Decalogue — and answer the Kremlin's questions about "Banderites" with the formula "yes, we are all of us like that." The twenty-seven years of forest war of 1929—1956 are not over — they have merely changed their face.
