The UPA and the Second World War

The UPA and the Second World War (1929—1956) was the longest partisan war of the twentieth century, fought by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army against three empires: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Communist Poland. Its origins lay in the founding of the OUN in 1929 by Colonel Konovalets and the 1940 split into OUN-B (Bandera) and OUN-M (Melnyk). On 30 June 1941 in Lviv, Stetsko proclaimed the Act of Restoration of the Ukrainian State — the Germans arrested the leadership. The UPA was formally established on 14 October 1942. After the war the struggle continued for more than a decade — until commander Shukhevych's death in 1950 and the final arrests of the mid-1950s.