Beyond the Reactive Thesis: The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the Volhynia Massacres, and the Catholic Churches’ Contribution to Polish–Ukrainian Reconciliation, 1942–2026

Beyond the Reactive Thesis: The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the Volhynia Massacres, and the Catholic Churches’ Contribution to Polish–Ukrainian Reconciliation, 1942–2026

Copyright © 2026. Natalie Ross. All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

This essay examines the 1943 Volhynia massacres, in which the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and its parent organisation, the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), killed tens of thousands of Polish civilians in German-occupied Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, and traces the contribution of Roman Catholic and Ukrainian Greek Catholic ecclesiastical diplomacy to the Polish–Ukrainian reconciliation process that followed. Drawing on archival holdings in Warsaw, Kyiv and the Vatican and on the historiography of Per Anders Rudling, Grzegorz Motyka, Ivan Katchanovski and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe — read against Norman Davies’ own contrasting June 2026 intervention in the live diplomatic crisis — the essay advances a dual accountability reading of the massacres: they were simultaneously the premeditated product of an identifiable OUN-B command structure and, at village level, a mobilisation of local participation. It distinguishes Stepan Bandera’s ideological founding role from his physical absence, in German custody, from the 1943 campaign itself, and locates operational command with Dmytro Klyachkivsky and Roman Shukhevych. It then argues that this same dual accountability underlies the comparative durability of Church-led reconciliation — from Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky’s wartime witness, through the dismantling of Greek Catholic structures under Operation Vistula, to the 1965 Polish–German bishops’ letter and the 2023 Gądecki–Shevchuk declaration, itself a limited and incomplete achievement — relative to unilateral political gestures, a distinction tested directly by the Ukrainian–Polish diplomatic crisis of May–July 2026.

Table of Contents

Introduction

I. Bandera’s Arrest and the Formation of UPA: Separating the Man from the Movement

II. The Historiographical Dispute: Davies, the Archival Historians, and the Limits of Contextualisation

III. The Archival and Forensic Record: Reconciling Polish and Ukrainian Casualty Figures

IV. Contemporaneous Ecclesiastical Witness: Metropolitan Sheptytsky and the Roman Catholic Clergy

V. Postwar Erasure: Operation Vistula and the Dismantling of Greek Catholic Ecclesiastical Structures

VI. From Confession to Architecture: The Catholic Model of Reconciliation, and Its Limits, 1965–2026

Conclusion

Postscript

Bibliography Notes

Introduction

Within days, Polish President Karol Nawrocki had announced his intention to strip Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state honour, which his predecessor Andrzej Duda¹ had awarded the Ukrainian president in Warsaw in 2023; Ukraine’s ambassador to Poland was summoned to the Polish Foreign Ministry; and Zelensky himself cancelled plans to attend the Ukraine Recovery Conference held in Poland the following month.² The episode might have remained a diplomatic embarrassment had it not detonated inside an already fraught bilateral relationship. Within weeks the opposition Law and Justice party was preparing a Sejm resolution intended to condition Polish support for Ukraine’s EU accession on the resolution of the Volhynia dispute,³ and on 17 July 2026 the Sejm itself unanimously adopted a resolution commemorating the genocide committed against the Polish population of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia between 1939 and 1947. ⁴ That same evening, President Zelensky announced a five-point plan intended to defuse the crisis, the second and third points of which committed Ukraine to opening all files held by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and the Foreign Intelligence Service concerning Volhynia and to issuing a substantially expanded number of permits for joint Polish–Ukrainian search and exhumation work.⁵

These are not antiquarian disputes conducted at one remove from the war. Poland remains among Ukraine’s most consequential wartime patrons, and Warsaw’s leverage over Kyiv’s accession file makes the Volhynia question a live strategic liability at precisely the moment Ukraine can least afford one — a point the British-Polish historian Norman Davies made explicitly in a June 2026 interview addressing the crisis directly, warning that escalating the historical dispute in wartime was a strategic mistake whose principal beneficiary would be Moscow, which has long promoted the idea that responsibility for OUN-B’s crimes extends to the Ukrainian nation as a whole rather than to the specific faction that committed them.⁶ Nor is the historiographical question separable from the diplomatic one. How UPA’s 1943 campaign against Volhynia’s Polish population is explained — as the more or less mechanical by-product of a territory crushed between two totalitarian occupations, or as the execution of an indigenously conceived nationalist programme — determines whether the reconciliation both governments profess to want is framed as an exchange of mutual apology or as a demand for one-sided confession.

This essay’s method is to test the “reactive radicalisation” reading of UPA’s violence against archival historians and direct critics who have engaged that reading on its own terms — Per Anders Rudling, Grzegorz Motyka, Ivan Katchanovski and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe — while treating Norman Davies’ own recent and more contextualising intervention as a live representative of the position under scrutiny, not a settled authority to be cited alongside it. The essay draws throughout on primary ecclesiastical and archival sources translated for this purpose from Polish, Ukrainian and Russian, and treats the Roman Catholic and Ukrainian Greek Catholic Churches not as incidental commentators but as historical actors in their own right — contemporaneous witnesses to the violence of 1942–43 and, six decades later, the principal institutional architects of a reconciliation grammar that Polish and Ukrainian political leaderships now imperfectly imitate.

The essay’s thesis is that the weight of archival evidence supports what might be termed a dual accountability reading of the Volhynia campaign: it was simultaneously the ideologically premeditated product of an identifiable OUN-B command structure and, at village level, a mobilisation of local and often coerced participation that resists reduction either to a single national plan or to a diffuse wartime chaos for which no one in particular was responsible. This dual reading — which forecloses neither nationalist apologia nor a levelling moral equivalence between perpetrator and victim populations — is, this essay argues, precisely what has allowed Catholic ecclesiastical diplomacy, from the 1965 Polish–German bishops’ exchange through the 2003 and 2023 joint Polish–Ukrainian commemorations to the archival opening of July 2026, to make progress, however incomplete, where purely political gestures have repeatedly stalled or reversed.

The essay proceeds in six stages: an examination of Bandera’s wartime imprisonment and the true locus of UPA command responsibility (I); the historiographical dispute over reactive versus indigenous causation, read through Davies’ own contribution to it (II); the archival and forensic record on which rival casualty figures rest (III); the contemporaneous witness of the Greek Catholic and Roman Catholic clergy, above all Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky (IV); the postwar dismantling of Greek Catholic ecclesiastical structures under Operation Vistula (V); and the Catholic-led architecture of reconciliation, and its limits, that has evolved from 1965 to the present (VI).

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I. Bandera’s Arrest and the Formation of UPA: Separating the Man from the Movement

Any assessment of individual responsibility for the Volhynia massacres must begin with an inconvenient chronological fact: Stepan Bandera, the figure whose name has become metonymic for Ukrainian integral nationalism, spent the entirety of the 1943 campaign in German custody. Bandera was detained by German security services in Kraków on 5 July 1941, days after Berlin repudiated the Ukrainian state proclaimed under his faction’s auspices in Lviv;⁷ released to restricted residence in Berlin for several weeks, he was arrested again, together with the leadership of his OUN faction (OUN-B), on 15 September 1941.⁸ In January 1942 he was transferred to the Zellenbau, a special cell block for high-value political prisoners at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where — held in conditions considerably less severe than those endured by the camp’s other inmates, yet still confined and cut off from any operational command — he remained until the Reich Security Main Office engineered his conditional release in September 1944, in the hope that he might rally anti-Soviet resistance as the Eastern Front collapsed westward.⁹

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army was founded within this interval. OUN-B combat detachments in Volhynia began to coalesce from October 1942, and over the following months command of what would become UPA-North passed to Dmytro Klyachkivsky, operating under the nom de guerre Klym Savur;¹⁰ overall command of the OUN-B underground and of the unified UPA passed to Roman Shukhevych at the Third Extraordinary Congress of the OUN in the autumn of 1943.¹¹ It is Klyachkivsky, not Bandera, to whom historians working from declassified Soviet security-service material attribute the mid-1943 directive ordering the extermination of Volhynia’s Polish population; one UPA commander who resisted the order was reportedly threatened with court martial for his refusal.¹²

This chronology performs necessary analytical work without performing exculpatory work. It is not a defence of Bandera to observe that he could not have issued operational orders from a Sachsenhausen cell block; it is a correction to a folk conflation, visible on both the nationalist and the polemical sides of the present controversy, that treats “Bandera” as shorthand for personal operational command of the 1943 campaign rather than as the founder of the ideological structure — and the eventual post-1944 leader of the movement — that produced the men who did give those orders. The Second Great Congress of the OUN-B, convened in Kraków in April 1941 under Bandera’s leadership, had already committed the movement to an exclusionary, ethnically defined conception of the Ukrainian state, the ideological premise on which Klyachkivsky’s and Shukhevych’s wartime conduct drew.¹³ A wartime American biographical assessment of Bandera, declassified decades later by the Central Intelligence Agency, illustrates how readily this distinction has been lost even in relatively well-informed contemporaneous sources: the file states, inaccurately, that Bandera escaped German custody in 1944 and personally joined the UPA — a compression of the record that obscures both the negotiated character of his 1944 release and his physical absence from the Volhynian campaign of the preceding year.¹⁴ Command responsibility properly attaches to the OUN-B Providnyk structure that Bandera had built and to which he returned after 1944, and, for the 1943 killings specifically, to Klyachkivsky and the UPA-North apparatus he commanded — not to an absent founder-figure whose personal wartime agency was, for these particular months, foreclosed by his captors.

That this chronology is more than an academic nicety is confirmed by its independent reappearance in the middle of the very controversy this essay opened with. Pressed in June 2026 to justify a more sympathetic reading of UPA than most professional historians allow, Norman Davies made exactly this argument: that Bandera was in German custody when the Volhynia massacre took place and that it did not happen on his orders — precisely the distinction between founder and field commander that the archival record compels.¹⁵ Where this essay parts from Davies, as Section II will show, is in what follows from that distinction.

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II. The Historiographical Dispute: Davies, the Archival Historians, and the Limits of Contextualisation

The distinction Section I draws between Bandera and UPA’s field command does not by itself settle how the 1943 campaign should be explained, and it is here that the historiography divides most sharply — a division sharpened rather than resolved by Davies’ own June 2026 intervention. Davies does not dispute that the massacres occurred or that they meet the threshold of genocide; his own assessment, offered explicitly in response to the current crisis, is that what happened in Volhynia was a crime within the spectrum of genocide, a matter to be discussed with caution but without euphemism.¹⁶ But he goes further than most specialist historians are willing to go, describing UPA as, in his words, “generally speaking, not a criminal organisation,” comparing its wartime and postwar conduct to that of Poland’s own anti-Soviet “Cursed Soldiers,” and estimating, without citing a documentary basis, that some ninety per cent of UPA’s membership had no connection to the Volhynia killings.¹⁷ The claim attracted immediate and pointed rebuttal within Poland’s own historical establishment. Mirosław Szumiło, a historian at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University who also serves as principal specialist at the Institute of National Remembrance, judged Davies’ framing indefensible and maintained that UPA was a criminal organisation in the ordinary sense of the term; a separate IPN researcher, Piotr Gontarczyk, then intervened on the opposite side, defending UPA’s characterisation as a formation fighting for Ukrainian independence rather than a criminal one, even while conceding that it had carried out the extermination of Volhynia’s Polish population. That two historians working from the same Polish state institution could not agree on how to characterise UPA is itself evidence of how unsettled this question remains, three years short of a century after the events in question.¹⁸

Davies’ position is best understood as a contemporary, journalistic echo of a longer-standing explanatory tradition that treats the Volhynia massacres as substantially a structural by-product of the region’s double subjection to Soviet occupation (1939–41) and Nazi occupation (1941–44): the rapid, overlapping destruction of Polish state authority, of the pre-war multi-ethnic social order, and of any institutional check on paramilitary violence, such that Volhynia’s populations were left to settle accounts amid a vacuum neither occupying power had any interest in policing. This account carries real explanatory force, and nothing in this essay disputes that occupation-induced institutional collapse created the permissive conditions within which mass violence became possible. Its analytical weakness, as archival historians working independently of one another have demonstrated, lies in what it cannot explain: why the violence was directed overwhelmingly against one ethnic population rather than distributed across the range of plausible targets that institutional collapse alone would predict, and why it was organised with the operational coherence — coordinated timing, standardised methods, explicit written orders, and, as Ewa Siemaszko’s documentary research has shown in detail, a recurring pattern of nocturnal village meetings at which local participation in the killings to come was announced as a condition of Ukrainian statehood — that recurs across Soviet, Polish and Ukrainian wartime documentation.¹⁹

Per Anders Rudling’s contribution operates at the level of ideology rather than operational method. Rudling traces OUN-B’s “integral nationalism” — its exclusionary, ethnically homogenising vision of the Ukrainian state, formalised in programmatic texts such as the 1929 “Ten Commandments of a Ukrainian Nationalist” — to the organisation’s formation in the 1920s and 1930s under the direct influence of contemporary Italian Fascist and German National Socialist models, and argues that this commitment cannot plausibly be characterised as a reaction improvised under double occupation, since it long predates either occupation.²⁰ Grzegorz Motyka’s monographic studies, drawing on holdings at Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance and the Karta Center, situate the 1943 campaign as a centrally ordered operation of ethnic cleansing carried out with substantial local participation recruited through propaganda, communal pressure and, in a minority of documented cases, coercion under threat of death — a finding that complicates rather than exonerates the picture of central direction, since it identifies a second, additional locus of agency operating alongside, and mobilised by, OUN-B’s command structure, without displacing responsibility from it.²¹ Motyka treats the distinct postwar anti-Soviet insurgency of 1944–60 — the same UPA that, on Davies’ reading, more closely resembles the Cursed Soldiers — as a separate phenomenon meriting assessment on its own, considerably more defensible, terms; the distinction Motyka draws by period is a more precise version of the distinction Davies draws by faction, and the difference between the two is instructive.²² Ivan Katchanovski’s survey-based research, drawing on original polling conducted in Ukraine in 2009 and 2013, demonstrates how incompletely this record has been absorbed into contemporary Ukrainian public memory of the OUN and UPA;²³ in separate archival research presented to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Katchanovski has documented the coordinated character of OUN-B and UPA violence against Polish and Jewish populations using Soviet-era and Ukrainian sources independent of the Polish and Anglophone historiography discussed above.²⁴

The specialist literature, in short, converges not on a single-cause account but on a model of concurrent causation. Occupation-induced societal collapse was a necessary condition of the Volhynia massacres — without it, neither the paramilitary infrastructure nor the impunity the killers required would have existed — but it was not a sufficient one. The decision to target Volhynia’s Polish civilian population specifically, and a substantial share of the violence carried out in pursuit of that decision, reflected a nationalist programme that OUN-B’s leadership had articulated years before the German invasion and retained the organisational capacity to execute once occupation had cleared the ground. This is also, ultimately, why Davies’ intervention — for all its value in warning against collectivising guilt onto the Ukrainian nation as a whole, a caution this essay shares — cannot be followed all the way to his own conclusion. The distinction that matters for reconciliation is not, as Davies frames it, between UPA as a whole and the ninety per cent of its membership he holds blameless, but between the OUN-B command structure examined in Section I, which bears organisational responsibility, and the wider Ukrainian population, which does not. Collapsing that distinction in UPA’s favour is as analytically unsound as collapsing it against the Ukrainian nation as a whole; the archival record reviewed in this section supports neither, and it is this more precise distinction, rather than either of its two flattened alternatives, that Sections IV through VI will show the Churches working, unevenly, to institutionalise.

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III. The Archival and Forensic Record: Reconciling Polish and Ukrainian Casualty Figures

The rival casualty figures that dominate popular and political discussion of Volhynia arise less from a shortage of evidence than from the still-incomplete state of its consolidation, and it is this incompleteness — rather than any inherent unknowability — that the archival record surveyed here addresses. Three primary archival bodies anchor the specialist literature independently of any secondary synthesis. The Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe and the Archiwum Akt Nowych (AAN) in Warsaw hold the wartime field dispatches and intelligence reporting of the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa), compiled contemporaneously by an organisation with every institutional incentive to document Ukrainian nationalist violence against the Polish underground it commanded.²⁵ The Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), through its Main Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation, has since the early 2000s conducted formal investigative case-work on the Volhynia and Eastern Galicia killings, compiling forensic and testimonial material to a standard suitable for prosecutorial use.²⁶ And the Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine in Kyiv holds declassified Soviet partisan intelligence on UPA troop movements and operations — material compiled by an occupying power with no institutional stake in either the Polish or the Ukrainian nationalist account of events, and therefore a valuable, if imperfect, check on both.²⁷

These sources have not converged on a single figure. Polish scholarship and official commemoration place the number of Polish civilians killed across Volhynia and Eastern Galicia at approximately 100,000, of whom some 40,000 to 60,000 are attributed to Volhynia specifically, 20,000 to 40,000 to Eastern Galicia, and a further 4,000 to territories within the borders of present-day Poland.²⁸ Ukrainian and revisionist accounts put the Volhynian figure considerably lower and place greater emphasis on the retaliatory killing of Ukrainian civilians by Polish Home Army units and self-defence formations, for which estimates range from as low as 1,000–2,000 up to 10,000–15,000 depending on the source and the territorial scope counted; Motyka’s own published estimates for both the Polish and Ukrainian death tolls have shifted across successive publications as new documentation has emerged, a pattern that should be read as a sign of the field’s ongoing archival maturation rather than of its unreliability.²⁹

Where the archival and forensic record has produced genuine convergence is at the level of individual sites, through a method that offers a template for resolving the aggregate dispute. At the neighbouring villages of Ostrówki and Wola Ostrowiecka in the former Luboml’ county, successive exhumations conducted in 1992, 2011 and 2015 recovered the remains of approximately 670 victims of the UPA-led killings of 30 August 1943, work carried out by identifying and cross-referencing individual remains against the pre-war parish registries of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Łuck rather than relying on retrospective estimation alone.³⁰ The two villages’ combined death toll, based on parish and testimonial reconstruction, is commemorated at 1,050 named victims, a figure the exhumations have partially, though not completely, corroborated.³¹ The method has continued to develop: in July 2026 Polish authorities used DNA analysis to identify Volhynia massacre victims’ remains for the first time, adding a further, independent layer of forensic verification to the parish-registry cross-referencing pioneered at Ostrówki and Wola Ostrowiecka.³² What recommends this cumulative method is precisely that it resolves a politically fraught aggregate dispute through documentation and physical evidence comparatively insulated from the national framing that has distorted the wider casualty debate.

The connection to the diplomatic events of July 2026 is direct rather than merely analogical. Ukraine had prohibited search and exhumation work outright between 2017 and 2025; a limited resumption began in January 2025, but Warsaw continued to complain that Kyiv was approving requests too slowly, a complaint the five-point plan of 17 July 2026 was explicitly designed to address.³³ President Zelensky’s commitment to expand permits for search and exhumation work and to open the SBU’s and Foreign Intelligence Service’s Volhynia-related holdings is, in substance, an undertaking to extend the Ostrówki–Wola Ostrowiecka method state-wide — precisely the evidentiary programme that Motyka’s and Katchanovski’s archival research has, in different registers, presupposed for two decades, and that even Davies’ more exculpatory account implicitly requires if his own estimate of UPA’s membership is ever to be tested against evidence rather than merely asserted from general historical impression.³⁴ Whether Ukrainian institutions can operationalise that commitment against archives that are, by outside observers’ account, voluminous, fragmentary and in places still encoded in Soviet-era cipher, remains to be seen; tellingly, the reception in Warsaw was itself cautious rather than celebratory, with the Polish prime minister welcoming the announcement “with satisfaction and hope” while his deputy insisted that the announcements “must turn into concrete actions.”³⁵ The method itself, however, is no longer in dispute among the specialists surveyed in this section. What is required is political will applied to an already-established evidentiary programme, not the invention of a new one — and it is the burden of Sections IV through VI to show where, historically, that political will has and has not been found.

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IV. Contemporaneous Ecclesiastical Witness: Metropolitan Sheptytsky and the Roman Catholic Clergy

Where Sections I through III have treated the OUN-B command structure and its historiographical reception, this section turns to a category of contemporaneous evidence that operates by a distinct and equally rigorous standard of judgement: the testimony of clergy who lived through the killings as they occurred, rather than reconstructing them retrospectively. The most consequential of these witnesses was Andrei Sheptytsky, Metropolitan of Halych and head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) since 1900, whose see at Lviv placed him at the administrative and moral centre of the territory in which OUN-B and UPA operated. Sheptytsky’s documented response to Nazi and nationalist violence developed cumulatively across 1941–43. In February 1942 he wrote directly to Heinrich Himmler protesting the conscription of Ukrainian auxiliary policemen into the killing of Jews;³⁶ in August 1942, in a letter to Pope Pius XII, he described the scale of the killing then underway in Galicia in terms that acknowledged his own earlier misjudgement of German intentions;³⁷ and on 21 November 1942 he issued the pastoral letter for which he is best remembered, “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” read from every pulpit in his archdiocese, which grounded its condemnation of political murder in an argument concerning the foundations of social order and which contemporaries understood as extending to the killing of civilians generally rather than to the Holocaust alone.³⁸Throughout 1943, as the Volhynian campaign unfolded outside his own eparchial boundaries but within the broader territory to which his moral authority extended, Sheptytsky maintained an extensive and largely covert correspondence with Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Eastern Church, in which — constrained by the interception of his couriers — he reported in general terms on the breakdown of order and the proliferation of armed bands of various political affiliations then operating across western Ukraine.³⁹

This documented record of protest did not translate into protection for the Roman Catholic clergy of Volhynia, whose fate underscores the limits of ecclesiastical authority against a paramilitary insurgency operating largely outside any single command’s effective reach. The scale of these losses is precisely documented rather than merely asserted. On Sunday 11 July 1943, the single most intensive day of the entire campaign, UPA units attacked worshippers during Mass at four churches in Volhynia — at Chrynów, Zabłoćce and Poryck in Włodzimierz county and at Kisielin in Horochów county — killing several hundred parishioners and, alongside them, three priests, with a fourth wounded.⁴⁰ Across the wider campaign, Ukrainian nationalist forces attacked a further twenty-five churches and monasteries in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia to which Polish civilians had fled for shelter, and destroyed or damaged at least 222 Roman Catholic churches, chapels and monasteries in total, a figure compiled from parish and diocesan documentation rather than from wartime estimation.⁴¹ These losses render the Church not an external commentator on the Volhynia campaign but one of its institutional victims, a status that complicates any reading of ecclesiastical witness as morally disinterested.

Historians remain divided, however, on the practical reach of Sheptytsky’s moral authority by 1943. The Metropolitan was, by this stage of the war, seventy-seven years old and confined for long periods by illness to his episcopal residence; more importantly, a documented minority of Orthodox and Greek Catholic parish clergy in the affected territories went beyond passive sympathy for the nationalist underground to active participation in sacralising its violence — blessing weapons and the burial mounds raised over OUN-UPA dead, and, in some recorded sermons, invoking the parable of the wheat and the tares from the Gospel of Matthew to cast the Polish population as a weed requiring removal.⁴² John-Paul Himka’s study of Sheptytsky’s relationship with the Bandera movement concludes that the Metropolitan’s public interventions coexisted with, rather than reliably restrained, this parallel current of clerical sympathy for integral nationalism, which his pastoral letters did not — and, given the compromised communications and wartime disorder of the eparchy, arguably could not — override.⁴³ This tension is not a reason to discount Sheptytsky’s testimony; if anything, it sharpens its evidentiary value. A witness whose own institutional authority was manifestly limited, and who nonetheless persisted in public and private protest at considerable personal risk, offers a more credible account of the period’s moral texture than either a fully compliant or a fully independent institution could have supplied — and it is precisely this credibility, rather than any institutional power he was able to exercise in 1943, on which the Church would draw when it returned to the Volhynia question eight decades later.

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V. Postwar Erasure: Operation Vistula and the Dismantling of Greek Catholic Ecclesiastical Structures

The ecclesiastical structures whose wartime witness Section IV has examined, and whose credibility would prove essential to the reconciliation this essay is building toward, did not long outlast the war that occasioned it. On 28 April 1947, Poland’s communist authorities launched Operation Vistula (Akcja Wisła), the codename for the forced resettlement, over the following three months, of between 140,000 and 150,000 ethnic Ukrainians, Lemkos, Boykos and Rusyns from Poland’s south-eastern voivodeships to the newly acquired territories in the north and west of the country.⁴⁴ The operation’s proclaimed rationale — the elimination of the rural support base sustaining the remnant UPA underground still active in the Bieszczady and Beskid mountains after Klyachkivsky’s death — cannot fully account for its scope: the deportees included the elderly, children and communities with no plausible connection to the insurgency, and the resettlement was accompanied by the systematic confiscation of Ukrainian and Greek Catholic ecclesiastical property.⁴⁵ Approximately 3,800 to 3,900 individuals suspected of UPA sympathies, including at least twenty-two Greek Catholic and five Orthodox priests, were interned without trial at the Central Labour Camp at Jaworzno, a former subcamp of Auschwitz repurposed for this operation, where conditions caused a documented number of deaths from illness, hunger and mistreatment.⁴⁶

The ecclesiastical consequences were structural and, for a decade, near-total. The Greek Catholic bishop of Przemyśl and his auxiliary were themselves deported in 1947, and the Vatican’s own Annuario Pontificio recorded the Diocese of Przemyśl as unstaffed in the years that followed, as was the separate Apostolic Administration of the Lemko region.⁴⁷ Igor Hałagida’s collective study of the 142 Greek Catholic clergy and religious who found themselves in the resettlement territories documents an effective prohibition on public Greek Catholic pastoral ministry: priests who wished to continue functioning at all were compelled to do so clandestinely or to serve, nominally, within the Latin rite, while a small number entered the state-sponsored “Patriotic Priests” movement under conditions of considerable historiographical controversy.⁴⁸ The Eparchy of Przemyśl was not restored until 1991.

The Lemko case illustrates a further dimension of the operation’s consequences that is easily obscured by the aggregate deportation figures. Jan Pisuliński’s study of the roughly 30,000 Lemkos deported under Operation Vistula — a Ukrainian-identified but linguistically and liturgically distinct highland population of the western Carpathians who had, for the most part, no documented connection to OUN-B or UPA activity — demonstrates that their forced dispersal across the resettlement territories, deliberately designed by the Polish authorities to prevent the reconstitution of cohesive Lemko communities, produced the paradoxical effect of consolidating a Lemko national and religious identity that had been comparatively fluid before 1947.⁴⁹ The suppression of visible ecclesiastical structures did not, in other words, achieve its apparent objective of dissolving a minority identity; it drove that identity into clandestine and diasporic forms of continuity that would resurface, institutionally, only after 1989 — a pattern of resilience through dispersal that anticipates, in miniature, the argument Section VI makes about the durability of Church-mediated identity relative to state-directed suppression or, for that matter, state-directed reconciliation.

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VI. From Confession to Architecture: The Catholic Model of Reconciliation, and Its Limits, 1965–2026

The template for the reconciliation architecture this essay’s thesis identifies as more durable than unilateral political gesture was established not between Poland and Ukraine but between Poland and Germany. On 18 November 1965, at the close of the Second Vatican Council, the bishops of Poland — including the Primate, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, and the Archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyła — addressed a pastoral letter, drafted principally by Archbishop Bolesław Kominek of Wrocław, to their West German counterparts, inviting them to Poland’s forthcoming millennium celebrations and containing the sentence that has since defined the genre: “we forgive and we ask for forgiveness.⁵⁰ “The formula’s significance, as Cardinal Henryk Muszyński’s retrospective analysis observes, lay precisely in its symmetry: it asked nothing of the German episcopate that the Polish bishops had not first offered themselves, a structure that allowed the letter to function as an act of ecclesiastical initiative independent of, and indeed initially denounced by, the Polish communist state.⁵¹ The formula reappeared, deliberately, in the Polish-Ukrainian context six decades later — but the institutional capacity to make it more than a form of words rests on a canonical architecture considerably older than any of the individuals who have since invoked it.

That architecture is worth making explicit before turning to its most recent exercise. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church’s capacity to act as simultaneously a fully Ukrainian and a fully Catholic institution rests on the 1990 Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, promulgated by Pope John Paul II two decades before Sviatoslav Shevchuk became head of the UGCC in 2011 and entirely independent of any position taken by its current or past leadership. The Code provides that the distinct rites of the Eastern Churches are to be religiously preserved and fostered as the patrimony of the whole Church, precisely because their diversity affirms the divine unity of the Catholic faith rather than threatening it.⁵² This principle of unity in diversity — a matter of universal canon law, not of any individual archbishop’s theology — gives the UGCC an institutional basis, unavailable to either the Polish or the Ukrainian state, for claiming simultaneous, undivided membership in both the Ukrainian national community that suffered Operation Vistula’s dispersal and the wider Catholic communion whose Polish member-church it now asks for, and grants, forgiveness. It is a structure built for exactly the kind of reconciliation-without-erasure that the political register has struggled to sustain, and it long predates, and does not depend on, the particular churchmen who have most recently drawn on it.

The comparison with the model attempted on the sixtieth anniversary, in 2003, is instructive precisely because it was not purely political, yet still fell short of what 2023 would achieve. Presidents Aleksander Kwaśniewski and Leonid Kuchma met at Pavlivka (Poryck) to lay a joint monument to reconciliation, following a joint parliamentary declaration by the Sejm and the Verkhovna Rada;⁵³ Pope John Paul II, marking the same anniversary, called on Poles and Ukrainians not to “remain enslaved by their sad memories of the past” while also insisting that Christians were called to acknowledge the errors of the past and to ask forgiveness for their own shortcomings.⁵⁴ The papal message thus anticipated the substance of what would become the 2023 formula. But it was delivered as a message rather than embodied in a jointly celebrated liturgy on Ukrainian and Polish soil, and it was not accompanied by a comparable parish-level or catechetical mobilisation: Andrii Portnov’s peer-reviewed analysis of the episode records that, as of 2003, 48.9 per cent of Ukrainians surveyed reported knowing nothing about the Volhynia massacres at all, a proportion the state-level and papal commemorations combined did little to change in subsequent years.⁵⁵ A message or a monument, however sincerely meant, does not by itself generate the parish-level, catechetical and memorial infrastructure through which a reconciliation formula becomes socially embedded; that infrastructure is precisely what the canonical architecture described above equips ecclesiastical institutions, uniquely among the available actors, to build.

The eightieth anniversary, in July 2023, was organised on the church-led model that architecture makes possible. On 7 July, Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki, president of the Polish Bishops’ Conference, and Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head of the UGCC, presided together over a service of “Forgiveness and Reconciliation” in Warsaw and signed a joint declaration explicitly invoking the 1965 formula.⁵⁶ Two days later, at the Roman Catholic cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in Lutsk, the two archbishops were joined by Epiphanius, Metropolitan of Kyiv and head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, and by the apostolic nuncio to Ukraine, for an ecumenical memorial service attended by Presidents Volodymyr Zelensky and Andrzej Duda, who lit commemorative candles together.⁵⁷ The ecclesiastical framing did not exclude the political register — heads of state were present and made public statements of their own — but it subordinated that register to a liturgical and confessional structure that neither government had the institutional standing to construct unilaterally.

The 2023 declaration’s achievement should not, however, be overstated. Its language exposed rather than resolved the underlying terminological dispute that Sections II and III have traced. Gądecki used the occasion to insist that unity could not be reached “without reference to the truth and without calling the genocide of the Polish population in Volhynia by name,” and called for that language to enter the school curricula of both countries;⁵⁸ Shevchuk, in the same set of ceremonies, described the killings only as “an experience that is a tragedy on both sides” — a formulation that stops well short of the genocide designation Poland has held since 2016 and that avoids assigning the organisational responsibility Section I has traced to OUN-B.⁵⁹ The declaration was, moreover, a bilateral Catholic instrument: the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, to which the majority of religiously affiliated Ukrainians belong, participated in the Lutsk prayer service but was not a signatory to the Warsaw declaration itself, limiting the reconciliation grammar’s reach into the confessional majority of Ukrainian society in a way the 1965 Polish–German precedent — agreed between institutions each commanding the overwhelming allegiance of its own national population — did not need to contend with. Nor, finally, did the declaration prove durable against a sufficiently determined unilateral political act: less than three years later, Zelensky’s decree honouring the “Heroes of the UPA” provoked precisely the crisis this essay opened with, to which the Catholic and Greek Catholic hierarchies again felt compelled to respond. On 29 June 2026, three Polish cardinals — Grzegorz Ryś, Konrad Krajewski and Kazimierz Nycz — joined Shevchuk and the Ukrainian cardinal Mykola Bychok in a fresh joint appeal invoking John Paul II’s own 2003 language and calling on both nations to “courageously forgive” and to extend “a hand of reconciliation” rather than “remain enslaved by the past.”⁶⁰ That a fourth ecclesiastical intervention was needed within three years of the 2023 declaration is itself evidence of the limits under discussion: church-led reconciliation has proved more durable than unilateral political gesture, but not immune to it, and it has so far achieved a shared liturgical vocabulary more securely than it has achieved a shared vocabulary of historical fact.

It is worth noting that even Davies’ own, more state-centred prescription for resolving the dispute converges on a version of this same insight. Pressed on how the two countries should proceed, Davies proposed not a further unilateral declaration by either government but a standing, bilateral Polish-Ukrainian truth and reconciliation commission modelled on South Africa’s post-apartheid mechanism, though he insisted this should wait until the war with Russia had ended.⁶¹ The proposal implicitly concedes what the ecclesiastical record already demonstrates: that durable reconciliation over Volhynia requires an institution capable of holding both nations’ testimony simultaneously, rather than a sequence of statements each side issues to the other. Poland and Ukraine do not yet have Davies’ secular commission; what they have had, imperfectly and intermittently, since 1965, is its ecclesiastical equivalent.

It is against this ecclesiastical template — patient, symmetrical, institutionally anchored, and now sixty years in continuous, if interrupted, development — that the events of July 2026 with which this essay opened should finally be read. President Zelensky’s five-point plan did not originate within a church structure, and the decree naming a special-forces unit for the “Heroes of the UPA” that provoked the crisis was, if anything, a direct violation of the reconciliation grammar the Churches had spent six decades constructing. Yet the remedy Zelensky reached for — archival opening, physical exhumation, the extension of an evidentiary and commemorative method pioneered at Ostrówki and Wola Ostrowiecka — belongs unmistakably to the tradition this section has traced, rather than to the unilateral political gesture that failed to sustain itself after 2003. Whether it is sufficient, and whether it will be followed by the parish-level and catechetical work that has given the 1965 and 2023 precedents their durability rather than by another cycle of gesture and rupture, remains, as of this writing, an open question to which I will add to later…

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Conclusion

This essay has argued for a dual accountability reading of the Volhynia massacres against two temptations that recur, in different guises, throughout the political and popular literature on the subject, including in its most recent iteration: an apologetic reading, of the kind Norman Davies himself advanced in June 2026, that would excuse the bulk of an organisation from the acts of its own command structure, and a collectivising reading, of the kind Russian propaganda has long promoted, that would extend individual and organisational culpability into an indictment of the Ukrainian nation as such. Neither is defensible against the archival record surveyed in Sections I through III. Stepan Bandera’s imprisonment throughout the 1943 campaign forecloses any reading that collapses his ideological founding role into personal operational command, without in any way diminishing the culpability of the OUN-B command structure — Klyachkivsky, and subsequently Shukhevych — that his Second Great Congress had equipped, years before the German invasion, with an exclusionary and ethnically defined conception of the Ukrainian state. Rudling’s, Motyka’s and Katchanovski’s independent bodies of research converge, not on a single-cause account, but on the concurrent operation of indigenous ideological premeditation and locally mobilised, unevenly motivated participation — a finding that assigns clear organisational responsibility while resisting the temptation to flatten local participation into either full collective guilt or the near-total exculpation Davies proposed. And the archival and forensic record, though not yet reconciled into a single casualty figure acceptable to both national historiographies, has demonstrated at Ostrówki and Wola Ostrowiecka, and now through DNA analysis, that convergence is achievable when documentation and physical evidence are allowed to substitute for national estimation.

Sections IV through VI have argued that this same dual accountability — moral clarity about perpetration, combined with a refusal to collectivise guilt — is precisely what has allowed ecclesiastical reconciliation to achieve more than unilateral political gesture has, even as it has fallen well short of resolving the dispute outright. Sheptytsky’s contemporaneous witness, compromised in its practical authority but morally unambiguous in its content, offered a wartime template for exactly this combination; the parishioners and priests killed at Chrynów, Zabłoćce, Poryck and Kisielin, and the 222 churches and chapels destroyed alongside them, stand as evidence that the Church was among the Volhynia campaign’s institutional victims, not merely a retrospective commentator on it. Operation Vistula’s dismantling of Greek Catholic ecclesiastical structures in 1947 demonstrated that suppression could disperse but not dissolve the institutional and confessional continuity on which later reconciliation would depend — a continuity that rests, as Section VI has shown, on a canonical architecture dating to 1990 and owing nothing to any individual prelate’s initiative. And the sixty-year arc from the 1965 Polish–German bishops’ letter through John Paul II’s unrealised 2003 appeal to the 2023 Gądecki–Shevchuk declaration — itself a bilateral Catholic instrument that left the Orthodox majority of Ukrainian believers outside its signature and the underlying dispute over “genocide” versus “tragedy” unresolved — has shown that reconciliation anchored in a symmetrical confessional formula outlasts reconciliation attempted by heads of state alone, without yet having proved sufficient on its own.

The events of July 2026 test this argument in real time. A single decree was sufficient to undo, in the space of days, political capital that had taken years to accumulate, in a way the 2023 ecclesiastical declaration — precisely because it was not a unilateral state gesture — had proved more resistant to, even as it required a fourth clerical intervention within three years to hold. That Zelensky’s five-point response reached for an evidentiary and archival method with clear ecclesiastical antecedents, rather than for a further unilateral political gesture, may be read as tacit recognition of the argument this essay has advanced; that Warsaw’s own reception of the plan was couched in the conditional language of words that must become actions suggests the recognition is not yet mutual trust. Whether Ukraine’s institutions can, in practice, extend the Ostrówki–Wola Ostrowiecka model to the still fragmentary and partially enciphered holdings of the SBU and Foreign Intelligence Service — and whether Poland’s own political establishment will meet that undertaking with the patient, symmetrical engagement the 1965 and 2023 precedents modelled, rather than the conditional, transactional linkage to EU accession that some in the Sejm have proposed — will determine whether the events of 2026 mark a renewal of the reconciliation architecture this essay has traced, or merely its latest, most public interruption. Norman Davies is right that Moscow is the only certain beneficiary of a Polish-Ukrainian rupture over a war that ended eighty years ago; he is wrong that the way to prevent that rupture is to minimise what OUN-B’s command structure did. The record this essay has assembled points to a different answer: not less accountability, but accountability precisely calibrated — to a command structure, not a nation — and channelled through the one set of institutions that has spent sixty years learning how to make such calibration hold.

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Postscript: Toward a Vetting Standard — International Precedent and the Prospects for Reform

The argument advanced in this essay has been historical and diagnostic rather than prescriptive: it has sought to establish what happened at Volhynia, who bore responsibility for it, and how the Churches have modelled a durable grammar of reconciliation in its aftermath. It closes, however, by looking briefly beyond that historical record to a question the events of 2026 have made unavoidable: whether the distinction this essay has drawn throughout — between an organisation’s command structure and its wider membership, between an era’s crimes and an institution’s present character — can be operationalised as policy rather than left to the ad hoc judgement of a single presidential decree. Other states, confronting comparable questions about which historical military formations may be honoured, which contemporary units may be trusted with international assistance, and which symbols belong in a democratic army’s usable past, have developed formal vetting architectures considerably more precise than anything so far applied to the “Heroes of the UPA” decree. Two bodies of comparative practice are instructive: international criteria for vetting military units, and historical cases in which units carrying a compromised inheritance were formally reformed rather than either retained unreflectively or abolished outright.

International Vetting Criteria for Military Units

The most directly applicable precedent is the United States’ own statutory framework for vetting foreign security forces, commonly known as the Leahy Law after its original Senate sponsor. Codified at 22 U.S.C. § 2378d for the State Department and 10 U.S.C. § 362 for the Department of Defense, the law bars the provision of American military assistance, training or equipment to any unit of a foreign state’s security forces for which the Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense holds credible information implicating that unit in a gross violation of human rights — defined, in State Department practice, as torture, extrajudicial killing, enforced disappearance or rape under color of law.⁶² The statute’s operative unit of analysis is deliberately the formation rather than the individual: an entire brigade or battalion may be barred from assistance even where only some of its members are implicated, and the bar attaches to the unit’s institutional history rather than to any single soldier’s conduct.⁶³ Critically, the law also specifies a path back: assistance may resume once the foreign government has taken effective steps to bring the responsible members of the unit to justice, meaning the standard is calibrated to accountability and remediation rather than to permanent exclusion.⁶⁴ This is, in miniature, precisely the distinction Section I of this essay has argued the historical record requires: responsibility attaches to a command structure and can be discharged through demonstrated accountability, not to an ethnic or national population in perpetuity.

Germany’s Bundeswehr operates a parallel but more explicitly historical framework. Its Traditionserlass — most recently revised in March 2018 under Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen as “Die Tradition der Bundeswehr: Richtlinien zum Traditionsverständnis und zur Traditionspflege” — holds that the Wehrmacht as an institution is not “tradition-worthy” (traditionswürdig) for the armed forces of a democratic state governed by the rule of law, having served a criminal regime whose crimes were, in the decree’s own language, unique in their scope, horror and degree of state organisation.⁶⁵ The same institutional disqualification is applied, with deliberate symmetry, to the East German National People’s Army as the principal armed instrument of a separate dictatorship. In both cases, however, the decree preserves an individual exception: specific soldiers who can be shown, after documented historical research, to have resisted or disobeyed the criminal regime they served may still be honoured, even though the institution that commanded them cannot.⁶⁶ The distinction the Bundeswehr draws by document is, structurally, the distinction this essay has drawn by archive: between Bandera the founder of an ideological structure and Klyachkivsky the officer who gave a specific criminal order, or between the OUN-B command apparatus examined in Sections I through III and the wider Ukrainian population Section II has argued should not be asked to answer for it.

A third model addresses naming specifically rather than institutional lineage. The United States Congress, responding to the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd in 2020, established a statutory Naming Commission under Section 370 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 to identify and recommend replacements for every Department of Defense asset commemorating the Confederacy or any individual who served it voluntarily.⁶⁷ The Commission’s criteria were notably strict: its final report explicitly precluded what it called “substitute” namesakes designed to preserve a controversial name’s surface form while changing its ostensible referent, citing as its own example the impermissibility of renaming Fort Bragg for an obscure, unrelated Bragg rather than removing the name altogether. Fort Bragg accordingly became Fort Liberty in June 2023, one of nine Army installations renamed under the Commission’s recommendations.⁶⁸ The episode also illustrates the limits of a purely administrative vetting process: in February 2025, the Department of Defense reversed the change and restored the name Fort Bragg — this time, formally, in honour of a different, lower-ranking serviceman who happened to share the surname, a workaround functionally indistinguishable from the “substitute namesake” the Commission had explicitly ruled out.⁶⁹ A vetting criterion, however well drafted, endures only for as long as the political will to apply it does — a lesson this essay’s account of Church-led reconciliation, more durable than unilateral political gesture but not immune to it, has already drawn from a different institutional register entirely.

Historical Examples of Reformed Units

Ukraine’s own recent history supplies the closest and most instructive precedent, because it involves the identical mechanism — Leahy vetting of a Ukrainian formation with a contested ideological inheritance — applied to a unit still serving today. The Azov Battalion was formed in May 2014 as a volunteer militia under the command of Andriy Biletsky, a figure whose earlier political activity was explicitly ultranationalist, and the unit’s early insignia and recruitment drew documented criticism, including from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, for tolerating neo-Nazi and white-supremacist elements within its ranks.⁷⁰ The unit was absorbed into Ukraine’s National Guard by 2015, and Congress barred it from receiving U.S. assistance under a Leahy-related provision from 2018.⁷¹ The Azov that defended Mariupol in 2022, however, was legally and organisationally distinct from the 2014 militia: reconstituted in February 2023 as the 12th Special Forces Azov Brigade of the National Guard, it underwent a formal Leahy vetting review by the State Department, which concluded in June 2024, after what the Department described as a thorough review, that it had found no evidence of a gross violation of human rights by the reconstituted unit, and lifted the decade-old restriction.⁷² Whatever one makes of the wisdom of that particular determination — it remains disputed among human rights organisations — the process itself demonstrates that the essay’s central distinction is not merely an academic abstraction: an American statutory framework applied it, formally and on the record, to a Ukrainian military formation within living memory, reaching a conclusion that separated a reformed present unit from a compromised founding cohort.

The cost of skipping such a process is equally well documented, and equally Ukrainian in its immediate reference. On 22 September 2023, the Speaker of Canada’s House of Commons invited a ninety-eight-year-old Ukrainian-Canadian veteran, Yaroslav Hunka, to be publicly honoured during a parliamentary address by President Zelensky, praising him as a “Ukrainian hero” and a “Canadian hero” without having verified his wartime service; Hunka received two standing ovations, including from Zelensky himself, before it emerged that he had served in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (“Galicia”), a formation raised by German authorities in 1943 and implicated, according to Jewish human rights organisations, in violence against Poles and Jews.⁷³ The Speaker resigned within days; Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologised to Parliament, to Canada’s Jewish community, and, through diplomatic channels, to the Ukrainian delegation; and the episode was seized upon by Russian officials and state media as evidence for exactly the collectivising narrative — that Ukrainian nationalism as such is inseparable from its most compromised wartime formations — that Sections I and II of this essay have argued the archival record does not support.⁷⁴ The contrast with the Azov case is instructive precisely because both involve contested Ukrainian military inheritances handled by a third state: one was subjected to a formal, criteria-based, unit-level review before public assistance or honour was extended; the other was not, and the absence of any process at all did more diplomatic damage in a single afternoon than the Azov Brigade’s decade of contested reputation had done cumulatively.

Taken together, these cases suggest that the “Heroes of the UPA” decree with which this essay opened was not, in comparative terms, an unusual act so much as an unvetted one. Ukraine possesses, in the SBU and Foreign Intelligence Service archives whose opening Section III has discussed, precisely the evidentiary base a Leahy-style or Traditionserlass-style review would require: material capable of distinguishing, at the level of named individuals and specific units, between UPA’s command structure and its locally mobilised membership, and between the organisation responsible for the 1943 directive and the far larger body of Ukrainians who fought the Soviet and German occupations without personal involvement in it. Nothing in the record this essay has assembled forecloses Ukraine from honouring its wartime resistance; what the Bundeswehr’s, the Naming Commission’s and the State Department’s practice each suggest, in their different ways, is that such honours are best conferred through a standing, criteria-based process — applied consistently, in advance of controversy, and insulated from the timing of any single diplomatic moment — rather than through a decree that, however sincerely intended, could not help being read, in Warsaw, as indifferent to the distinction this essay has spent six sections trying to establish. Whether Ukraine or its partners choose to build such a process is a question of policy this essay cannot resolve; that the international precedent for doing so already exists, and that it converges with the historical record rather than against it, is the one forward-looking claim this essay is prepared to make.

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Bibliography

Archival Collections and Primary Documents

Archiwum Akt Nowych (AAN), Warsaw. Wartime field dispatches and intelligence reports of the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa), 1943–1944.

Central Intelligence Agency. “BANDERA, STEFAN.” Declassified biographical file. CREST database. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/BANDERA,%20STEFAN_0085.pdf.

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Polish Bishops’ Conference and Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Joint Declaration of Reconciliation. Warsaw, 7 July 2023.

Polish Bishops’ Conference. Orędzie biskupów polskich do ich niemieckich braci w Chrystusowym urzędzie pasterskim [Message of the Polish Bishops to Their German Brothers]. 18 November 1965.

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Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine (Галузевий державний архів Служби безпеки України, GDA SBU), Kyiv. Fond 2 and Fond 6, declassified Soviet partisan intelligence on OUN-UPA operations, 1943–1950.

Sejm of the Republic of Poland. Resolution on the Anniversary of the Genocide Committed by Ukrainian Nationalists against the Polish Population in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. Warsaw, 17 July 2026.

Sheptytsky, Andrei. “Тому не убий” [Thou Shalt Not Kill]. L’vivs’ki arkhieparkhial’ni vidomosti 55, no. 11 (Lviv, November 1942): 177–83.

Sheptytsky, Andrei. Correspondence with Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, Sacred Congregation for the Eastern Church, 1941–1943. Discussed in Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, “Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky and the Holocaust: New Documents and New Interpretations of Historical Contexts,” 17 February 2022.

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Monographs

Filar, Władysław. Wołyń 1939–1944: Eksterminacja czy walki polsko-ukraińskie. Toruń: Adam Marszałek, 2003.

Motyka, Grzegorz. Od rzezi wołyńskiej do akcji “Wisła”: Konflikt polsko-ukraiński 1943–1947. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011.

Motyka, Grzegorz. Ukraińska partyzantka 1942–1960: Działalność Organizacji Ukraińskich Nacjonalistów i Ukraińskiej Powstańczej Armii. Warsaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza Rytm / Instytut Studiów Politycznych PAN, 2006.

Motyka, Grzegorz. Wołyń ’43: Ludobójstwo, fakty, analogie, kontekst. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2016.

Rossoliński-Liebe, Grzegorz. Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult. Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2014.

Siemaszko, Władysław, and Ewa Siemaszko. Ludobójstwo dokonane przez nacjonalistów ukraińskich na ludności polskiej Wołynia 1939–1945. 2 vols. Warsaw: von Borowiecky, 2000.

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Hałagida, Igor. “Greek Catholic Church and its Clergy in the Western and Northern Territories of Poland Between 1947 and 1957 – An Outline of a Collective Portrait.” Przegląd Zachodniopomorski 35 (64), z. 4 (2020): 9–35. https://doi.org/10.18276/pz.2020.4-01.

Himka, John-Paul. “Christianity and Radical Nationalism: Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky and the Bandera Movement.” In State Secularism and Lived Religion in Soviet Russia and Ukraine, edited by Catherine Wanner, 93–116. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press / Oxford University Press, 2012.

Himka, John-Paul. “Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky and the Holocaust.” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 26 (2013): 337–59.

Horbal, Bogdan. “Лемковина в Центральным Лаґрі Працы в Явожні” [The Lemko Region at the Central Labour Camp in Jaworzno]. Rìčnik Ruskoj Bursy 13 (2017).

Katchanovski, Ivan. “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and the Nazi Genocide in Ukraine.” Paper presented at “Collaboration in Eastern Europe during World War II and the Holocaust,” Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, 5–7 December 2013.

Katchanovski, Ivan. “Terrorists or National Heroes? Politics and Perceptions of the OUN and the UPA in Ukraine.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 48, no. 2–3 (2015): 217–28.

Muszyński, Henryk J. “Forgiveness and Reconciliation between Poles and Germans as a Gift and Task: Fifty Years after the Exchange of Letters of Polish and German Bishops.” Paedagogia Christiana 37, no. 1 (2016): 139–62.

Osadczy, Włodzimierz, and Andrzej Kulczycki, eds. Nie zabijaj. Nacjonalizm i ludobójstwo na Kresach wobec Kościoła, etyki chrześcijańskiej i zasad humanizmu. Warsaw–Lublin, 2019.

Pisuliński, Jan. “Lemkos, Poles, and Operation Vistula: The Suffering of the Lemkos and its Reception among the Poles.” The Polish Review 64, no. 2 (2019): 46–59.

Portnov, Andrii. “Clash of Victimhoods: The Volhynian Massacre 1943 in Polish and Ukrainian Memory.” Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 3, no. 2 (2017).

Rudling, Per Anders. “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths.” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 2107 (2011).

Siemaszko, Ewa. “Trzecie ludobójstwo.” Essay. Institute of National Remembrance educational portal, edukacja.ipn.gov.pl.

Zięba, Andrzej A. “Akcja ‘Wisła’: przyczyny i sprawcy, rezonans i konsekwencje” [Operation ‘Vistula’: Causes and Perpetrators, Resonance and Consequences]. Rìčnik Ruskoj Bursy 13 (2017).

Comparative Military Vetting and Naming Sources

“Canada House Speaker Apologizes for Praising Ukrainian Veteran Who Fought for Nazis.” ABC News, 26 September 2023.

“Fort Bragg 2.0: Army Base Reverts to Its Old Name, But with a New Namesake.” NPR / Houston Public Media, 11 February 2025.

“Nazi SS Veteran Receives Standing Ovation in Canadian Parliament.” Peoples Dispatch, 26 September 2023.

“Russia Blasts Canada over ‘Outrageous’ Reception in Parliament for Ukrainian Who Served in Nazi Unit.” Reuters, reported via CBC News, 25 September 2023.

“So Long Fort Bragg, Welcome Fort Liberty: The Pentagon’s Naming Commission Recommendations Take Effect.” Fox News, 2 June 2023.

“Traditionserlass – Bundeswehr: Doch keine Wehrmachtsgrößen als Vorbilder.” nd-aktuell.de, 12 September 2024.

“Trudeau Apologizes after Man Who Fought in Nazi Unit Was Praised by Parliamentarians at Zelenskyy Event.” CBC News, 26 September 2023.

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“US Lifts Ban On Neo-Nazi Linked Azov Brigade in Ukraine.” postscriptus.substack.com, 11 June 2024.

“US Lifts Ban on Neo-Nazi Linked Azov Brigade in Ukraine.” Responsible Statecraft, 11 June 2024.

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Bundesministerium der Verteidigung. Die Tradition der Bundeswehr: Richtlinien zum Traditionsverständnis und zur Traditionspflege. 28 March 2018.

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The Naming Commission. Final Report to Congress, Part III: Renaming Department of Defense Assets. 2022.

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Weber, Michael A. “Global Human Rights: Security Forces Vetting (‘Leahy Laws’).” Congressional Research Service, In Focus IF10575, updated 6 January 2025.

Institutional and Contemporary Sources

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“Czarnek Urges Poland to Block Ukraine’s EU Accession over Volhynia Dispute.” Mezha.net, 11 July 2026.

“Davies nie ma wątpliwości. ‘Ta afera będzie Polskę kosztować.'” Wirtualna Polska, 1 July 2026.

“Konflikt o UPA. Prof. Norman Davies: Ukraińcy będą mieli straszne pretensje do Polaków.” Rzeczpospolita, 29 June 2026.

“Mocny głos w sprawie UPA. Są podobieństwa do Żołnierzy Wyklętych?” Wprost, 1 July 2026.

“Norman Davies: UPA nie była organizacją przestępczą.” Kresy.pl, 30 June 2026.

“Poland Announces Breakthrough on Exhumation of WW2 Massacre Victims in Ukraine.” Notes from Poland, 10 January 2025.

“Poland Criticises Zelensky for Naming Military Unit after Group Responsible for Massacring Poles.” Notes from Poland, 29 May 2026.

“Poland Marks Anniversary of WWII Massacres by Ukrainians amid Diplomatic Dispute with Kyiv.” Notes from Poland, 11 July 2026.

“Poland Uses DNA Testing to Identify Victims of WWII Ukrainian Massacres for First Time.” Notes from Poland, 14 July 2026.

“Poland Welcomes Zelensky’s Five-Point Plan for Resolving Dispute over WWII Massacres.” Notes from Poland, 18 July 2026.

“Polish President Decides to Strip Zelensky of Honour for Naming Unit after Group that Massacred Poles.” Notes from Poland, 19 June 2026.

“Pracownik polskiego IPN broni UPA. Nazywa ją ‘formacją niepodległościową’ i odrzuca określenie ‘zbrodnicza.'” Kresy.pl, 14 July 2026.

“Super Express. ‘Prof. Davies ostrzega Polskę po aferze z Ukrainą. To będzie kosztować.'” Super Express, 29 June 2026.

“Szokujące słowa znanego historyka o UPA. ‘Ogólnie nie była organizacją kryminalną.'” Do Rzeczy, 1 July 2026.

“Ukrainian and Polish Bishops Jointly Appeal for Reconciliation and Forgiveness amid Historical Dispute.” Notes from Poland, 30 June 2026.

“WW2 Massacre of Poles by Ukrainians Must Be Called Genocide, Says Head of Polish Church.” Notes from Poland, 7 July 2023.

“Zelensky Set to Skip Ukraine Recovery Conference in Poland amid Diplomatic Dispute.” Notes from Poland, 23 June 2026.

Commissioner for Human Rights (Poland). “70th Anniversary of the Operation Vistula [Polish: Akcja Wisła].” bip.brpo.gov.pl.

Davies, Norman. Interview. Onet, 29 June 2026.

European Network Remembrance and Solidarity. “The Operation ‘Vistula.'” enrs.eu.

Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine (SZRU). Official historical portal. szru.gov.ua.

Institute of National Remembrance (IPN). “Commemoration of the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Massacre in Ostrówki and Wola Ostrowiecka.” News release, 2 September 2018. eng.ipn.gov.pl.

Institute of National Remembrance (IPN). “Przystanek Historia” educational portal. przystanekhistoria.pl.

Institute of National Remembrance (IPN). “The Commemoration of the Seventy-Eighth Anniversary of the Massacre in Ostrówki and Wola Ostrowiecka.” News release, 29 August 2021. eng.ipn.gov.pl.

Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine. Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Toronto. Accessed July 2026. http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com.

New Eastern Europe. “The Genocide Myth and Poland’s Victimisation Complex.” 1 December 2017.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. “Poland/Ukraine: Painful Chapter of Shared Past Commemorated, But Many Find It Difficult to Turn Page.” 11 July 2003.

RBC-Ukraine. “Volhynia Tragedy: Its Essence and Why It Is a Problem in Ukraine’s Relations with Poland.” 3 October 2024.

The New Voice of Ukraine. “Ukraine and Poland — Controversy Over Unit Named after UPA Heroes and Diplomatic Reactions.” 3 June 2026.

Ukrainian Jewish Encounter. “Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky and the Holocaust: New Documents and New Interpretations of Historical Contexts.” 17 February 2022.

Ukrainska Pravda. “Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry Responds to Polish Sejm Resolution on Volyn Tragedy Anniversary.” 17 July 2026.

Vatican News. “Warsaw: A New Chapter in Polish-Ukrainian Reconciliation.” 7 July 2023.

---

NOTES

1. Volodymyr Zelensky, Decree No. 440/2026, 26 May 2026 (Office of the President of Ukraine), granting the honorary title “Heroes of the UPA” to the Separate Center for Special Operations “North” of Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces; reported in “Ukraine and Poland — Controversy Over Unit Named after UPA Heroes and Diplomatic Reactions,” The New Voice of Ukraine, 3 June 2026. ↩︎
2. “Poland Criticises Zelensky for Naming Military Unit after Group Responsible for Massacring Poles,” Notes from Poland, 29 May 2026; “Polish President Decides to Strip Zelensky of Honour for Naming Unit after Group that Massacred Poles,” Notes from Poland, 19 June 2026; “Zelensky Set to Skip Ukraine Recovery Conference in Poland amid Diplomatic Dispute,” Notes from Poland, 23 June 2026. ↩︎
3. “Calls Are Being Made in Poland to Block Ukraine’s Accession to the EU over Volhynia,” UA.News, 11 July 2026; “Czarnek Urges Poland to Block Ukraine’s EU Accession over Volhynia Dispute,” Mezha.net, 11 July 2026. ↩︎
4. Sejm of the Republic of Poland, Resolution on the Anniversary of the Genocide Committed by Ukrainian Nationalists against the Polish Population in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, Warsaw, 17 July 2026; “Poland Marks Anniversary of WWII Massacres by Ukrainians amid Diplomatic Dispute with Kyiv,” Notes from Poland, 11 July 2026. ↩︎
5. Volodymyr Zelensky, statement of 17 July 2026 (Office of the President of Ukraine); “Poland Welcomes Zelensky’s Five-Point Plan for Resolving Dispute over WWII Massacres,” Notes from Poland, 18 July 2026. As with other citations to events of May–July 2026 in this essay, this note should be treated as provisional pending publication of the official gazetted text of the Sejm resolution and of any implementing instrument issued by the Ukrainian presidential administration. ↩︎
6. Norman Davies, interview, Onet, 29 June 2026; reported in “Konflikt o UPA. Prof. Norman Davies: Ukraińcy będą mieli straszne pretensje do Polaków,” Rzeczpospolita, 29 June 2026, and “Prof. Davies ostrzega Polskę po aferze z Ukrainą. ‘To będzie kosztować,'” Super Express, 29 June 2026. Davies has served on the advisory board of Notes from Poland. ↩︎
7. Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2014); “BANDERA, STEFAN,” declassified biographical file, CREST database, Central Intelligence Agency, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/BANDERA,%20STEFAN_0085.pdf. ↩︎
8. Rossoliński-Liebe, Stepan Bandera; “Bandera Stepan,” biographical entry, European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) Online Portal, https://portal.ehri-project.eu/authorities/ehri_pers-000021. ↩︎
9. Rossoliński-Liebe, Stepan Bandera; “Bandera Stepan,” EHRI Online Portal. ↩︎
10. “Ukrainian Insurgent Army,” Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Toronto), s.v., accessed July 2026, http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com; “Dmytro Klyachkivsky ‘Klym Savur’: The Main Perpetrator of the Volhynian Genocide,” Institute of National Remembrance educational portal, przystanekhistoria.pl. ↩︎
11. “Roman Shukhevych: The Last Report of the Commander-in-Chief of the UPA,” Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine (SZRU), official historical portal, szru.gov.ua. ↩︎
12. “Dmytro Klyachkivsky ‘Klym Savur’: The Main Perpetrator of the Volhynian Genocide,” przystanekhistoria.pl, citing Władysław Filar’s research in declassified SBU holdings; Władysław Filar, Wołyń 1939–1944: Eksterminacja czy walki polsko-ukraińskie (Toruń: Adam Marszałek, 2003). ↩︎
13. Postanovy II Velykoho Zboru Orhanizatsii Ukrainskykh Natsionalistiv [Resolutions of the Second Great Congress of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists], Kraków, April 1941, Electronic Archive of the Ukrainian Liberation Movement (Електронний архів українського визвольного руху), accessed July 2026, https://avr.org.ua. ↩︎
14. “BANDERA, STEFAN,” declassified biographical file, CREST database, Central Intelligence Agency, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/BANDERA,%20STEFAN_0085.pdf. ↩︎
15. Norman Davies, interview, Onet, 29 June 2026, reported in “Davies nie ma wątpliwości. ‘Ta afera będzie Polskę kosztować,'” Wirtualna Polska, 1 July 2026, and “Mocny głos w sprawie UPA. Są podobieństwa do Żołnierzy Wyklętych?,” Wprost, 1 July 2026. ↩︎
16. Norman Davies, interview, Onet, 29 June 2026, reported in “Szokujące słowa znanego historyka o UPA. ‘Ogólnie nie była organizacją kryminalną,'” Do Rzeczy, 1 July 2026, and “Norman Davies broni UPA. ‘Porównywalne do Żołnierzy Wyklętych,'” Do Rzeczy, 1 July 2026. ↩︎
17. “Pracownik polskiego IPN broni UPA. Nazywa ją ‘formacją niepodległościową’ i odrzuca określenie ‘zbrodnicza,'” Kresy.pl, 14 July 2026, reporting the response of Mirosław Szumiło, professor of history at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University and principal specialist at the Institute of National Remembrance’s Bureau of Historical Research, and the countervailing intervention of IPN researcher Piotr Gontarczyk. ↩︎
18. Ewa Siemaszko, “Trzecie ludobójstwo,” essay, Institute of National Remembrance educational portal, edukacja.ipn.gov.pl, drawing on Władysław Siemaszko and Ewa Siemaszko, Ludobójstwo dokonane przez nacjonalistów ukraińskich na ludności polskiej Wołynia 1939–1945, 2 vols. (Warsaw: von Borowiecky, 2000). ↩︎
19. Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 2107 (2011). ↩︎
20. Grzegorz Motyka, Wołyń ’43: Ludobójstwo, fakty, analogie, kontekst (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2016); Grzegorz Motyka, Ukraińska partyzantka 1942–1960: Działalność Organizacji Ukraińskich Nacjonalistów i Ukraińskiej Powstańczej Armii (Warsaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza Rytm / Instytut Studiów Politycznych PAN, 2006). ↩︎
21. Motyka, Ukraińska partyzantka 1942–1960. ↩︎
22. Ivan Katchanovski, “Terrorists or National Heroes? Politics and Perceptions of the OUN and the UPA in Ukraine,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 48, no. 2–3 (2015): 217–28. ↩︎
23. Ivan Katchanovski, “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and the Nazi Genocide in Ukraine” (paper presented at “Collaboration in Eastern Europe during World War II and the Holocaust,” Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, 5–7 December 2013), archived via the University of Ottawa. ↩︎
24. Archiwum Akt Nowych (AAN), Warsaw, wartime field dispatches and intelligence reports of the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa), 1943–1944; Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, Warsaw. ↩︎
25. Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), Warsaw, investigative case files of the Main Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation (Główna Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu), relating to the Volhynia and Eastern Galicia massacres, 1943–1944. ↩︎
26. Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine (Галузевий державний архів Служби безпеки України, GDA SBU), Kyiv, Fond 2 (Secretariat of the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR) and Fond 6 (Individual Case Files), declassified Soviet partisan intelligence on OUN-UPA operations, 1943–1950. ↩︎
27. President of the Republic of Poland, letter of President Andrzej Duda read at ceremonies marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Volhynia massacre, Warsaw, 11 July 2018, president.pl; Grzegorz Motyka, Wołyń ’43. ↩︎
28. Grzegorz Motyka, Ukraińska partyzantka 1942–1960; Władysław Filar, Wołyń 1939–1944; on the range of lower Ukrainian and revisionist estimates, see “The Genocide Myth and Poland’s Victimisation Complex,” New Eastern Europe, 1 December 2017, and “Volhynia Tragedy: Its Essence and Why It Is a Problem in Ukraine’s Relations with Poland,” RBC-Ukraine, 3 October 2024. ↩︎
29. Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), “Commemoration of the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Massacre in Ostrówki and Wola Ostrowiecka,” news release, 2 September 2018, eng.ipn.gov.pl; Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), “The Commemoration of the Seventy-Eighth Anniversary of the Massacre in Ostrówki and Wola Ostrowiecka,” news release, 29 August 2021, eng.ipn.gov.pl; parish registries of the pre-war Roman Catholic Diocese of Łuck, cited in IPN forensic reports and in Motyka, Wołyń ’43. ↩︎
30. Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), “Commemoration of the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Massacre in Ostrówki and Wola Ostrowiecka,” news release, 2 September 2018, eng.ipn.gov.pl. ↩︎
31. “Poland Uses DNA Testing to Identify Victims of WWII Ukrainian Massacres for First Time,” Notes from Poland, 14 July 2026. ↩︎
32. “Poland Welcomes Zelensky’s Five-Point Plan for Resolving Dispute over WWII Massacres,” Notes from Poland, 18 July 2026; “Poland Announces Breakthrough on Exhumation of WW2 Massacre Victims in Ukraine,” Notes from Poland, 10 January 2025. ↩︎
33. Grzegorz Motyka, Wołyń ’43; Katchanovski, “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and the Nazi Genocide in Ukraine.” ↩︎
34. “Poland Welcomes Zelensky’s Five-Point Plan for Resolving Dispute over WWII Massacres,” Notes from Poland, 18 July 2026, quoting Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Deputy Prime Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz. ↩︎
35. Andrei Sheptytsky to Heinrich Himmler, February 1942, discussed in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Andrew Sheptytsky Collection, and in John-Paul Himka, “Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky and the Holocaust,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 26 (2013): 337–59. ↩︎
36. Andrei Sheptytsky to Pope Pius XII, August 1942, discussed in Himka, “Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky and the Holocaust,” 337–59. ↩︎
37. Andrei Sheptytsky, “Тому не убий” [Thou Shalt Not Kill], L’vivs’ki arkhieparkhial’ni vidomosti 55, no. 11 (Lviv, November 1942): 177–83. ↩︎
38. Andrei Sheptytsky, correspondence with Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, Sacred Congregation for the Eastern Church, 1941–1943, discussed in Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, “Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky and the Holocaust: New Documents and New Interpretations of Historical Contexts,” 17 February 2022. ↩︎
39. Ewa Siemaszko, “Trzecie ludobójstwo,” edukacja.ipn.gov.pl, citing Władysław Siemaszko and Ewa Siemaszko, Ludobójstwo dokonane przez nacjonalistów ukraińskich na ludności polskiej Wołynia 1939–1945, vol. 1, 160–62, 826–27, 838, 896–98. ↩︎
40. Nie zabijaj. Nacjonalizm i ludobójstwo na Kresach wobec Kościoła, etyki chrześcijańskiej i zasad humanizmu, ed. Włodzimierz Osadczy and Andrzej Kulczycki (Warsaw–Lublin: 2019), 154–60, cited in Ewa Siemaszko, “Trzecie ludobójstwo,” edukacja.ipn.gov.pl. ↩︎
41. Nie zabijaj, ed. Osadczy and Kulczycki, 145, cited in Ewa Siemaszko, “Trzecie ludobójstwo,” edukacja.ipn.gov.pl. ↩︎
42. John-Paul Himka, “Christianity and Radical Nationalism: Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky and the Bandera Movement,” in State Secularism and Lived Religion in Soviet Russia and Ukraine, ed. Catherine Wanner (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press / Oxford University Press, 2012), 93–116. ↩︎
43. Commissioner for Human Rights (Poland), “70th Anniversary of the Operation Vistula [Polish: Akcja Wisła],” bip.brpo.gov.pl; European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, “The Operation ‘Vistula,'” enrs.eu. ↩︎
44. Andrzej A. Zięba, “Akcja ‘Wisła’: przyczyny i sprawcy, rezonans i konsekwencje” [Operation ‘Vistula’: Causes and Perpetrators, Resonance and Consequences], Rìčnik Ruskoj Bursy 13 (2017). ↩︎
45. Bogdan Horbal, “Лемковина в Центральным Лаґрі Працы в Явожні” [The Lemko Region at the Central Labour Camp in Jaworzno], Rìčnik Ruskoj Bursy 13 (2017); Igor Hałagida, “Greek Catholic Church and its Clergy in the Western and Northern Territories of Poland Between 1947 and 1957 – An Outline of a Collective Portrait,” Przegląd Zachodniopomorski 35 (64), z. 4 (2020): 9–35. ↩︎
46. Hałagida, “Greek Catholic Church and its Clergy,” 9–35, citing Annuario Pontificio 1947, 288. ↩︎
47. Hałagida, “Greek Catholic Church and its Clergy,” 9–35. ↩︎
48. Jan Pisuliński, “Lemkos, Poles, and Operation Vistula: The Suffering of the Lemkos and its Reception among the Poles,” The Polish Review 64, no. 2 (2019): 46–59. ↩︎
49. Polish Bishops’ Conference, Orędzie biskupów polskich do ich niemieckich braci w Chrystusowym urzędzie pasterskim [Message of the Polish Bishops to Their German Brothers], 18 November 1965. ↩︎
50. Henryk J. Muszyński, “Forgiveness and Reconciliation between Poles and Germans as a Gift and Task: Fifty Years after the Exchange of Letters of Polish and German Bishops,” Paedagogia Christiana 37, no. 1 (2016): 139–62. ↩︎
51. Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches (Codex Canonum Ecclesiarum Orientalium), Vatican City, 1990, cann. 39–40. ↩︎
52. “Poland/Ukraine: Painful Chapter of Shared Past Commemorated, But Many Find It Difficult to Turn Page,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 11 July 2003. ↩︎
53. Pope John Paul II, message marking the sixtieth anniversary of the Volhynia massacres, 2003, quoted in “Ukrainian and Polish Bishops Jointly Appeal for Reconciliation and Forgiveness amid Historical Dispute,” Notes from Poland, 30 June 2026. ↩︎
54. Andrii Portnov, “Clash of Victimhoods: The Volhynian Massacre 1943 in Polish and Ukrainian Memory,” Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 3, no. 2 (2017). ↩︎
55. Polish Bishops’ Conference and Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Joint Declaration of Reconciliation, Warsaw, 7 July 2023; “Warsaw: A New Chapter in Polish-Ukrainian Reconciliation,” Vatican News, 7 July 2023. ↩︎
56. “Warsaw: A New Chapter in Polish-Ukrainian Reconciliation,” Vatican News, 7 July 2023. ↩︎
57. “Warsaw: A New Chapter in Polish-Ukrainian Reconciliation,” Vatican News, 7 July 2023, quoting Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki. ↩︎
58. “WW2 Massacre of Poles by Ukrainians Must Be Called Genocide, Says Head of Polish Church,” Notes from Poland, 7 July 2023, quoting the Polish Press Agency (PAP). ↩︎
59. “Ukrainian and Polish Bishops Jointly Appeal for Reconciliation and Forgiveness amid Historical Dispute,” Notes from Poland, 30 June 2026. ↩︎
60. Norman Davies, interview, Onet, 29 June 2026, reported in “Davies nie ma wątpliwości. ‘Ta afera będzie Polskę kosztować,'” Wirtualna Polska, 1 July 2026, and “Norman Davies: UPA nie była organizacją przestępczą,” Kresy.pl, 30 June 2026.  ↩︎
61. Norman Davies, interview, Onet, 29 June 2026, reported in “Davies nie ma wątpliwości. ‘Ta afera będzie Polskę kosztować,'” Wirtualna Polska, 1 July 2026, and “Norman Davies: UPA nie była organizacją przestępczą,” Kresy.pl, 30 June 2026. ↩︎
62. 22 U.S.C. § 2378d; 10 U.S.C. § 362; U.S. Department of State, “Leahy Law Fact Sheet,” 20 January 2025. ↩︎
63. 22 U.S.C. § 2378d(a)–(b); U.S. Department of State, “Leahy Vetting and Awards Requirements,” state.gov. ↩︎
64. Bundesministerium der Verteidigung, Die Tradition der Bundeswehr: Richtlinien zum Traditionsverständnis und zur Traditionspflege, 28 March 2018. ↩︎
65. Bundesministerium der Verteidigung, Die Tradition der Bundeswehr, 28 March 2018; discussed in “Traditionserlass – Bundeswehr: Doch keine Wehrmachtsgrößen als Vorbilder,” nd-aktuell.de, 12 September 2024. ↩︎
66. National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, Pub. L. No. 116-283, § 370 (2021); The Naming Commission, Final Report to Congress, Part I: United States Army Bases (2022), p. 14 (ruling out “substitute” namesakes designed to preserve a controversial name’s surface form while changing its ostensible referent, citing as its own example the impermissibility of renaming Fort Bragg for an obscure, unrelated Bragg rather than removing the name altogether). ↩︎
67. “So Long Fort Bragg, Welcome Fort Liberty: The Pentagon’s Naming Commission Recommendations Take Effect,” Fox News, 2 June 2023. ↩︎
68. “Fort Bragg 2.0: Army Base Reverts to Its Old Name, But with a New Namesake,” NPR / Houston Public Media, 11 February 2025. ↩︎
69. “US Lifts Ban on Neo-Nazi Linked Azov Brigade in Ukraine,” Responsible Statecraft, 11 June 2024; “US Lifts Ban On Neo-Nazi Linked Azov Brigade in Ukraine,” postscriptus.substack.com, 11 June 2024, citing reporting by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. ↩︎
70. “US Lifts Ban On Neo-Nazi Linked Azov Brigade in Ukraine,” postscriptus.substack.com, 11 June 2024, citing the 2018 omnibus government spending package. ↩︎
71. “U.S. Lifts Ban on Sending Weapons to Ukraine’s Azov Brigade,” CBS News, 11 June 2024; “U.S. Lifts Weapons Ban on Ukraine’s Azov Brigade,” The Washington Post, 12 June 2024; “US Lifts Ban on Sending Weapons to Ukraine’s Azov Brigade,” NBC News, 11 June 2024. ↩︎
72. “Canada House Speaker Apologizes for Praising Ukrainian Veteran Who Fought for Nazis,” ABC News, 26 September 2023; “Nazi SS Veteran Receives Standing Ovation in Canadian Parliament,” Peoples Dispatch, 26 September 2023. ↩︎
73. “Trudeau Apologizes after Man Who Fought in Nazi Unit Was Praised by Parliamentarians at Zelenskyy Event,” CBC News, 26 September 2023; “Russia Blasts Canada over ‘Outrageous’ Reception in Parliament for Ukrainian Who Served in Nazi Unit,” Reuters, reported via CBC News, 25 September 2023. ↩︎
74. CBC News, “Speaker of the House of Commons Anthony Rota resigns after honouring Nazi SS veteran in Parliament,” 26 September 2023; Reuters, “Trudeau apologizes for giving standing ovation to Ukrainian man who fought for Nazis,” 25 September 2023. ↩︎

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