Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists

Yevhen Konovalets, OUN's leader from 1929 to 1938

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was established in 1929 by radical nationalists and holding a prominent role fascists, that advocated for an independent, ethnically cleansed, homogenous totalitarian state with all other political parties banned.^[5][6] Prior to World War II, the extreme OUN was smaller and less influential among the minority Ukrainians in Poland than the moderate UNDO party.^[7][8] The OUN, that emulated the Nazi's organizational system, closely collaborated with other fascist states and movements, particularly in Germany, but also in Italy, Japan, Romania and Spain, many were Nazi agents.^{[9][10][11][12]} Ukrainian nationalism was formed under the influence of such political theorists as Dmytro Dontsov's political thought, characterised by a need for totalitarianism, national chauvinism also antisemitism, Mykola Stsiborskyi and Yevhen Onatsky as well as Italian Fascism and German Nazism.^[13][14][15] Before the war, the OUN regarded the Second Polish Republic as an immediate target, but even then it viewed the Soviet Union, although not operating on its territory, as the main enemy and greatest oppressor of the Ukrainian people.^[16] Even before the war, impressed by the successes of fascism, OUN radicalised its stance, and it saw Nazi Germany as its main ally in the fight for independence.^[17]

From the very beginning there was a strong division within the OUN between the "young" and "old" groups. The group of older activists was born around 1890 and experienced the service of fighting during WWI and later for Ukrainian independence, they were also active in the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO), while the younger activists were born later and grew up in independent Poland. The young were much more radical, calling for the use of terror in political struggle, but both groups were united by national radicalism and advocacy of a totalitarian system.^[18] The leader of the "old" group Andriy Melnyk claimed in a letter sent to the German minister of foreign affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop on 2 May 1938 that the OUN was ideologically akin to similar movements in Europe, especially to National Socialism in Germany and Fascism in Italy.^[19]

OUN's terrorist methods, fascination with fascism, rejection of parliamentary democracy and acting against Poland on behalf of Germany did not find support among many other Ukrainian organizations, especially among the so-called Petliurites, i.e. former activists of the Ukrainian People's Republic.^[20] In the course of the war, with the approaching defeat of Nazi Germany, the OUN-B changed, at least in official statements, its political image. It moved away from fascist symbolism and totalitarianism toward democratic slogans.^[21][12] OUN's denials of its role in the Holocaust began in 1943 after it became obvious that Germany would lose the war. The whitewashing continued after the war, with OUN's propaganda describing its legacy as a "heroic Ukrainian resistance against the Nazis and the Communists".^{[22][23][24][25][26]}

Outbreak of the war

Before 1939, Ukrainian territories were split between Poland, the Soviet Union, Romania and Czechoslovakia.^[27] The Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, followed by the Soviet invasion on September 17 that captured the eastern provinces of the Second Polish Republic.^[28][29] On 1 November 1939, Polish territories annexed by the Soviet Union (i.e. Volhynia and Eastern Galicia) were incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Initially, the Soviet occupation was met with limited support from the ethnic Ukrainian population. Repression was directed mainly against the ethnic Poles, and the Ukrainization of education, land reform, and other changes were popular among the Ukrainians. The situation changed in the middle of 1940 when collectivization began and repressions hit the Ukrainian population. There were 2,779 Ukrainians arrested in 1939, 15,024 in 1940 and 5,500 in 1941, until the German invasion of the Soviet Union.^[30]

The situation for ethnic Ukrainians under German occupation was much better. About 550,000 Ukrainians lived in the General Government in German-occupied Poland, and they were favoured at the expense of Poles. Approximately 20 thousand Ukrainian activists escaped from the Soviet occupation to Warsaw or Kraków.^[31] In late 1939, Nazi Germany accommodated OUN leaders in the city of Kraków, the capital of the General Government and provided a financial support for the OUN.^[32][33] The headquarters of the Ukrainian Central Committee headed by Volodymyr Kubijovyč, the legal representation of the Ukrainian community in the Nazi zone, were also located in Kraków.^[34][35]

Creation of OUN-B, pogroms and anti-Soviet uprising

Andriy Melnyk, OUN-M

In Kraków on 10 February 1940 a revolutionary faction of the OUN emerged, called the OUN-R or, after its leader Stepan Bandera, the OUN-B (Banderites). This was opposed by the current leadership of the organization, so it split, and the old group was called OUN-M after the leader Andriy Melnyk (Melnykites). The OUN-M dominated Ukrainian emigration and the Bukovina, but in Ukraine itself, the Banderists gained a decisive advantage (60% of the agent network in Volhynia and 80% in Eastern Galicia).^[36]

The OUN-B was more radical and already in 1940 began preparations for an anti-Soviet uprising. However, Soviet repression delayed these plans and more serious fighting did not occur until after the German invasion of the USSR in July 1941. According to OUN-B reports, they then had about 20,000 men grouped in 3,300 locations in Western Ukraine.^[37] In addition, Ukrainian Nachtigall and Roland battalions were formed under German command and numbered about 800 men. The NKVD was determined to liquidate the Ukrainian underground, according to Soviet reports 4435 members were arrested between October 1939 and December 1940.^[38] There were public trials and death sentences were carried out. In the first half of 1941, 3073 families (11329 people) of members of the Polish and Ukrainian underground were deported from Eastern Galicia and Volhynia.^[39] Soviet repression forced about a thousand members of the Ukrainian underground to take up partisan activities even before the German invasion.^[40]

The OUN seized about 213 villages and organized diversion in the rear of the Red Army. In the process, it lost 2,100 soldiers and 900 were wounded.^[41]

OUN's anti-Semitism was influenced by Nazi Germany but the organization also had its own, independent anti-Semitic tradition.^[42] The OUN-B formed Ukrainian People's Militsiya that, displaying exceptional cruelty, carried out at least 58 documented antisemitic pogroms and massacres of Jews that claimed between 13,000 and 35,000 lives. The biggest pogroms carried out by the Ukrainian nationalists took place in Lviv resulting in the massacre of 6,000 Polish Jews.^{[43][44][45][46]} The involvement of OUN-B is unclear, but certainly OUN-B propaganda fuelled antisemitism.^[47] The vast majority of pogroms carried out by the Banderites occurred in Eastern Galicia and Volhynia.^[48]

After the German capture of Lviv in 1941, the OUN leadership declared the Act of restoration of the Ukrainian state. Hitler, however, was opposed to Ukrainian statehood, having set his sights on the ruthless economic exploitation of the newly-acquired territories. OUN was banned, Bandera was arrested on July 5 and placed under house arrest in Berlin.^[49][2][11] The OUN-B went underground and encouraged its members and supporters to join the German administration and especially the auxiliary police.^[50]

Declaration of the Ukrainian State June 30, 1941

Following the German army, they managed to extend their network also into eastern Ukraine, but their slogans did not find support among the local population.^[51] The OUN-M on the other hand acted openly and took over local governments in western Ukraine, including Lviv. OUN-B fought OUN-M, going so far as to murder its members. In late 1941 and early 1942, the Germans started to fight the influence of OUN-M by arresting its members, so they also went underground. Another group was the so-called Polissian Sich formed by Taras Bulba Borovets, who referred to the traditions of the Ukrainian People's Republic.^[52] After the German attack he occupied and controlled Sarny and Olevsk, formed an alliance with the Germans and fought the Soviet remnants as police chief. In November 1941, he was forced to disband his unit (which at that time numbered about 2,000–3,000 people) after the Germans wanted to limit his independence and he refused to participate in the liquidation of the Jews.^[53] However, even after that, the power of the occupation administration over the territory of Polesia was mostly limited to cities, railway stations and roads. The countryside turned into an arena of brutal confrontation between several guerrillas armies.^[54]

Mass executions of Jews began in the autumn of 1941 on German-occupied territories and continued in the second half of 1942 when the Germans began liquidating Jewish ghettos. Some Ukrainian auxiliary policemen took part in these executions.^[55] From 1942, the local non-Jewish population also became targets of repression. The Germans began to deport the population en masse to the Reich for forced labour and to demand large supplies from the farmers. For their refusal, the Germans began to punish the population with executions and pacifications of Ukrainian and Polish villages. The Ukrainian auxiliary police also took part in the pacification actions, but the mood of rebellion was growing in their ranks.^[52]

As a result, partisan units reappeared in Western Ukraine, including Soviet ones and the first Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) formed by Taras Bulba-Borovets. Bulba-Borovets went into active combat in April 1942, mainly against the Germans; the group entered into a neutrality agreement with the Soviet partisans. In December 1942, he proposed to the Melnykites and Banderites to join forces with him as commander-in-chief. The OUN-B rejected the proposal, but the OUN-M, who had already begun to form their own units, accepted the offer.

Stepan Bandera, OUN-B

Creation of UPA, anti-German uprising and extermination of Poles

Dmytro Klyachkivsky - first head-commander of the UPA-North.

In October 1942 OUN-B decided to form its own partisans, called OUN Military Detachments. Individual units entered active combat in February 1943 (first was sotnia of Hryhoriy Perehinyak attack on German police station in Volodymyrets on 7 February).^[56] At the third OUN-B conference (17-23 February 1943) it was decided to launch an anti-German uprising in order to liberate as much territory as possible before the arrival of the Red Army. The uprising was to break out first in Volhynia, for which purpose the formation of a partisan army called the Ukrainian Liberation Army began there.^[57] The uprising broke out in mid-March, with Dmytro Klyachkivsky and Vasyl Ivakhiv leading it, and Klyachkivsky alone after Ivakhiv death in May that year. It was also at that time that the name given to it was abandoned and the name Ukrainian Insurgent Army, taken over from Bulba-Borovets, began to be used, thus impersonating it. The new army basis were Ukrainian policemen, who deserted en masse (about 5 000) between March and April 1943. By July 1943, the UPA had 20,000 soldiers.^[58] Even before the anti-German uprising started, OUN-B units started to attack Polish villages and murder Poles. This soon turned into a full-scale extermination campaign, aimed at killing off or driving out the Polish population from areas considered by OUN-B to be Ukrainian. The main target of UPA's ethnic cleansing were Poles, mainly women and children, but they also killed other ethnic minorities such as Jews, Czechs, Hungarians, Armenians and even many Ukrainians. UPA fighters used mainly farm tools such as scythes, knives and pitchforks to commit their murders of civilians.^[59][60][61]

Attacks on Poles were the reason why Taras Bulba-Borowets rejected the proposal of cooperation and he also criticised the idea of a premature uprising against the Germans. To distinguish himself from the OUN-B army, he adopted the name Ukrainian National Revolutionary Army (UNRA). The maximum number of UNRA soldiers was approximately 3,000-4,000.^[62] Most OUN-M units had no such resistance and joined the UPA. Those that resisted as well as the UNRA and Ukrainian Revolutionary Front units were mostly broken up or forcibly forced to cooperate in the summer of 1943.^[63] In July–August 1943, the UPA ruled over a large territory of Volhynia, cleared of Germans and Polish population. OUN-B units in eastern Galicia, bearing the name Ukrainian National Self-Defence (UNS) joined the fight later, only in the late summer of 1943, and only in a limited capacity.^[64] From January 1944, the incorporation of UNS units in Eastern Galicia into the UPA began. This also became the beginning of the extermination of Polish people in Eastern Galicia, which started in April of that year.^[65]

At the Third Congress of the OUN (21-25 August 1943) it was decided to make preparations for an open fight against the Red Army, with plans to extend it to other parts of the Soviet Union, involving other oppressed nations. Decisions were also taken to move away from extreme nationalist rhetoric and adopt a more pro-democratic one.^[21] It was also around that time when acting OUN leader Mykola Lebed was replaced with a three-person Provid Office in which Roman Shukhevych played a major role.^[66] Shukhevych also soon assumed the role of UPA commander-in-chief in place of Klyachkivsky.^[66]

With gradual German withdrawal from western Ukraine, UPA started to strike German rear units capturing their equipment. These actions provoked the German raids on UPA positions. By the end of July 1944, the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council, an OUN-B outfit, reached a signed agreement with the Germans for a unified front against the Soviet Union and for UPA diversionary activities in the rear of the Soviet front. The signed deal ended UPA raids on the German rear positions and opened door to the flow of arms and training materials from the Germans. UPA-German cooperation ended in early 1945 when it ceased to be beneficial to the OUN-B.^[67][68]

Clockwise: Roman Shukhevych, Dmytro Hrytsai and Catherine Miéchko-Lagouch. November 1943, shortly before the penultimate phase of massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.

In 1944 UPA reached a peak membership of 25-30,000 guerrillas.^[69][70] Together with the militias of the Sluzhba Bezpeky, Self-defense Kushch Units and the field network of agents, the number of people linked to the underground reached about 100,000 people.^[70] In April 1943, the Germans began forming the Ukrainian SS "Galicia" division. The OUN-B leadership was initially negative to the idea but later began to support the enlistment of members in the formation as a good opportunity to receive military training. The division was broken up in June 1944, only 3,000 soldiers managed to avoid death or capture, and several hundred of them joined the UPA.^[71] The OUN leadership and the UPA command were convinced that the Russians were prepared to destroy all Ukrainians, basing this on the experience of the Holodomor,^[72][73] which is seen as a Soviet genocide of Ukrainians by numerous countries.

At the beginning of 1944, the Red Army came to the areas of UPA's activity. In January–February 1944, it occupied a large part of Volhynia. The troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front, with the forces of the 13th and 60th armies, carried out the Rivne-Lutsk offensive, capturing these two regional centers on February 2. In the occupied territories, the Soviet authorities seized food, conscripted local Ukrainians en masse into the Red Army, and after a few days of training threw them on the front. The majority of party and state cadres were foreigners from the USSR, who often behaved like conquerors in a conquered country, and treated the local Ukrainian population with contempt. There were also numerous examples of fraud, theft, and rape committed by Soviet soldiers.^[74]:10

Fights in Volhynia and Podolia (the first half of 1944)

The UPA tried to undermine Soviet authorities and block the mobilisation of the local population into Soviet units.^[75] They attacked recruitment committees and conducted agitation among the local population. They changed their tactics in September 1944, when they encouraged some of their followers to join the army in order to disintegrate it from within and propagate nationalist content. This effort was quite successful, as by September 1, 1944, the 1st Ukrainian Front had only managed to call up 56% of the planned number of recruits.^[76]

UPA officers

The majority of the UPA guerrillas viewed Stepan Bandera as their leader. They were ordinary Ukrainian Banderites, but the ranks of UPA also contained Ukrainians from the former 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician), German SS men, including a German SS officer Anton Eichner and Slovak Hlinka Guards.^[77]

The approach of the Red Army forced UPA's to develop further strategy and tactics of war with occupiers. The UPA South group was ordered to leave the Vinnytsia and Kamianets-Podilskyi regions, where there were few forests, and retreat to Volhynia together with two parts of the UPA East army group. In the second half of January 1944, units of the UPA crossed the front in the Volhynia forest belt along with the Sluch and Horyn rivers.

On February 12, 1944, the first appeal of the Soviet leadership to the UPA was published, calling for them to voluntarily come out of the underground and lay down their arms. Persons suspected of aiding the underground were deported to the east of the USSR.^[78] The bodies of those killed were often put on display to intimidate others. For the same purpose, open trials and public executions of captured members of the OUN-B and UPA were organized, to which even schoolchildren were expelled.

Christmas card made and distributed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army 1945

On February 29, 1944, a UPA detachment attacked a convoy of General Mykola Vatutin, commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front, leaving the headquarters of the Thirteenth Army, as a result of which the general was seriously wounded and died a month later in a Kyiv hospital. According to the most common version, near the village of Mylyatyn in the Ostroh district, a column was fired upon by a UPA detachment under the command of Petro "Aeneas" Oliynyk.

The Soviet government responded to Vatutin's assassination just as harshly. The 1st Ukrainian Front allocated one cavalry division, reinforced by 20 armoured vehicles and eight tanks to fight the insurgents in March of that year. A battalion garrison was stationed in each district, and NKVD Internal Troops regiments were stationed in regional centers. In total, more than 30,000 NKVD soldiers were sent to fight the UPA. Some units arrived in Ukraine directly from Chechnya and Kalmykia, where deportations had just ended. In some villages, subordinate NKVD Destruction battalions were created. Ten armoured trains supported by amphibious groups arrived to protect the railways.

In March 1944, the Soviets recorded 270 attacks on Red Army soldiers. In April 1944, the insurgents' actions changed dramatically. The troops of the First Ukrainian Front were preparing for an offensive against the Nazi invaders. This did not suit the OUN leadership, and it ordered a series of deep raids on the rear of the Red Army. In the areas north of the Kovel-Rivne-Shepetivka railway line, open-armed clashes took place, during which UPA units suffered significant losses.^[79]

On March 28, Nikita Khrushchev was told that 1,129 OUN and UPA members had been killed in 65 operations, and by April 7, that number had risen to 2,600 killed and 3,256 taken prisoner. The actual losses amounted to 112 killed and 90 wounded.^[80]

The biggest battle of the UPA with regular Soviet troops took place on April 21–28, 1944 in the Kremenets forests near the village Gurby. The Soviets engaged about 15,000 troops against more than 4,000 UPA partisans concentrated there. Both sides considered themselves the winners of this skirmish. According to Soviet reports, they killed 2018 people and arrested 1570, they also seized large quantities of weapons and food warehouses, losing only eleven dead and 46 wounded. By contrast, according to UPA reports, they lost only 136 dead and 75 wounded, while they killed between 120 and 900 Soviets. The battle was in fact inconclusive, the region was cleared of partisans, but the UPA units were not broken.^[81]

According to Soviet data, in the first half of 1944, the NKVD killed 16,338, captured 15,991 insurgents, and appeared with 2549 convicts. Also, 3676 members of the OUN underground and the UPA were arrested. In addition, 27,361 people who had evaded conscription were detained. The casualties among the NKVD personnel were as follows. Killed: 37 NKVD officers, 655 officers and soldiers of the NKVD and Red Army troops, and 112 missing. As of July 1, 1944, 80 active UPA detachments with 6,749 participants were included in the front line (which included the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR captured by the Red Army).

Fights after pushing out the Germans by the Red Army

In July 1944, during an operation to seize western Ukraine, Soviet troops surrounded and defeated eight German divisions of about 60,000 near Brody. Among them were 10,000 soldiers of the SS Galicia division. About 5,000 managed to escape from the encirclement, but many were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. An estimated 3,000 escaped captivity, many of whom later joined the rebels. At the end of the Lviv-Sandomierz offensive, almost all of Galicia was already in the hands of Soviet troops. On July 27, the Red Army occupied Lviv, Stanislav, and Przemyśl, and on August 6, Drohobych and Boryslav. Thus, the Germans lost almost all of Ukraine, except for the mountain range and Transcarpathia. At that time, only a small part of the UPA was on the German side of the front, in the Carpathians.

In August 1944, after the Red Army entered Hungary, Romania, and Poland, the active actions of the UPA resumed. In addition to ambushes on highways, shelling and killing individual servicemen, attacks on military depots, and sabotage of communications, the OUN-UPA's actions also aimed to disrupt food supplies to the Red Army. Some military units were also attacked. Thus, on August 18, 1944, the 1st Communications Battalion of the 1331st Rifle Regiment, which was marching to the front, was ambushed on the road near Pidhaitsi in the Ternopil region. Most of the soldiers and officers were killed, only 11 survived.^[82]

Anti-insurgency operations continued in the summer of 1944. On July 30, 1944, military groups of 207 and 208 separate infantry battalions discovered and destroyed the UPA-North headquarters headed by Chief of Staff Leonid Stupnytsky while combing the Dermansky Forest in the Rivne region. As a result of the battle, 70 (mostly the leadership and their guards) were killed and 73 insurgents were captured. In August 1944, 220 military operations were conducted in the Lviv region alone, as a result of which more than 5,000 members of the OUN-UPA were killed. During the Soviet operation of the NKVD and the Fourth Ukrainian Front in the Drohobych area from August 18 to September 9, 1,171 were killed and 1,180 "Bandera supporters" were taken prisoner, and 6,000 people who evaded mobilization were detained. Between January 10 and February 23, 1945, about 26,000 insurgents were captured and 11,000 killed.

In the autumn of 1944, the issue of coordinating the actions of Melnyk's armed formations and UPA detachments were finally resolved. "Melnykites" were stationed in the north-western regions of Volhynia and the Carpathians, cooperating with Ukrainian People's Revolutionary Army (UNRA) units and the Germans. The OUN-M divisions in the Carpathian region were headed by S. Kasyan ("Korop"), and the general command was headed by Ivan Kedyulych ("Chubchyk"). During the crossing of the fronts through the Carpathians Melnykites received a proposal from the UPA to unite troops. With the sanction of the commander of the OUN-M armed forces, General Kapustyansky, such a merger took place, and Ivan Kedyulych was included in the main military headquarters.^[83] At the end of summer 1944, auxiliary detachments of the NKVD (Destruction battalions) were actively formed. By November, 203 fighter battalions (27,796 fighters) and 2,997 support groups (27,385 members) had been formed. By the end of 1944, there were 212 fighter battalions with 23,906 fighters and 2,336 support groups with 24,025 members in the western regions of Ukraine.^[84]

On October 9, 1944, the NKVD and the NKDB of the USSR issued an order "On measures to combat the OUN underground and eliminate OUN armed gangs in the western regions of the USSR." According to him, the western regions of the USSR were divided into two zones of responsibility - Lviv, Stanislav, Drohobych, and Chernivtsi regions were engaged in the People's Commissar of the NKVD Vasyl Ryasny and the NKDB Serhiy Savchenko, and the head of the border troops of the Ukrainian district Petro Burmak; Rivne, Volyn, and Ternopil regions were managed by Deputy People's Commissars Strokach and Danylo Yesypenko, and the head of the NKVD of the Ukrainian District Mykhailo Marchenkov.^[85]

According to the NKVD, from February to December 31, 1944, 6,495 operations were conducted in Western Ukraine, in which 57,405 insurgents were killed. In addition, 4,744 families (13,320 people) of UPA members and people who had helped them were expelled from the USSR. As a result of operations were seized: one U-2 aircraft, one armoured vehicle and one armoured personnel carrier, 35 guns, 323 mortars, 321 machine guns and 2,588 machine guns, 211 PTR, 18,600 rifles, 4,200 submachine guns, and other weapons and equipment including 135 walkie-talkies and 18 printing presses. The losses of the Soviet side during the same period killed and hanged - during operations and relevant actions of the UPA were: NKVD-NKGB - 221 (37 missing or captured), officers of the NKVD and the Red Army - 157 (31), soldiers and sergeants 1 880 (402), 904 (127), local residents - 1 953 (248) and fighters of fighter battalions - 40 (230). A total of 2,903 "gang manifestations" by the OUN-UPA were recorded.^[86]

Fights in 1945

The losses suffered by the UPA in 1944, in a clash with NKVD troops, forced the OUN-b leadership to rethink tactics. Realizing that in a skirmish with the NKVD they could not succeed, in early February 1945. Shukhevych, Dmytro Hrytsai (head of the UPA Central Command), Roman Kravchuk, head of the OUN Galician regional leadership, P. Duzhiy, propaganda officer of the OUN Central leadership, Mykola Arsenych, head of the OUN Central Executive Committee, Vasily Cook. During the meeting, it was decided to move to action using mobile (small) units (four), large units to partially disband, and subordinate combat groups to the territorial leadership.^[110]

On January 29, 1945, in the Kalush region, an NKVD operative group led by Petro Furmanchak captured former UNS commander Oleksandr Lutsky. For almost two years, during interrogations, he spoke in detail about the history of the creation and activities of the UNS, UPA, and the OUN Security Council.^{[111][112][113]} Lutsky was shot dead in Kyiv in November 1946.

According to Soviet data, at the end of February 1945 40 large units of the UPA (2608 people) and 68 small groups and units of the Security Service numbering 1115 soldiers, a total of 3169 soldiers operated in the Rivne region, and in the Volyn region - 28 "gangs" of 25- 150 soldiers (about 1,200 in all).^[114]

After the death on February 12, 1945, of the commander of the UPA-North and the leader of the OUN-B at the PZUZ Dmytro Klyachkivsky ("Klima Savura"), the leadership was headed by Mykola Kozak ("Smok"). Assessing in one report the situation with underground personnel in the Western OUN on the PZUZ, he acknowledged that among them - only 30% of reliable, active OUN members, and the rest - NKVD agents (50%) or ideological, passive elements (20%). From January–August 1945, the OUN Security Service liquidated 833 OUN members, who were accused of collaborating with the NKVD and KGB.^[115]

In all, according to Soviet data, 9,238 Chekist military operations were conducted against the UPA in the first half of 1945: 2,565 in January, 1,448 in February, 1,849 in March, 1,568 in April, 1,205 in May, and 1,603 in June. The result was the death of 34,210 members of the liberation movement, captured 46059; appeared with the guilt of 25868 soldiers, a total of 106137. In addition, 5717 "gang manuals" were arrested, 5395 families of "bandits" were evicted (12,773 people).^[116]

In all, the Red Army suffered the following casualties as a result of attacks by the UPA and armed members of the OUN-B and the suppression of armed resistance by other insurgent groups (UNRA and Melnyk's detachments) in 1944: 157 officers and 1,880 soldiers and sergeants were killed, hanged and wounded - 74 and 1770, respectively, "missing and taken to the forest" - 31 and 402. From the beginning of the year to May 1, 1945, were "killed or hanged" 33 officers and 443 soldiers and sergeants, 11 officers and 80 soldiers and sergeants disappeared missing.^[117] During the NKVD operations against the UPA in the first half of 1945 it seized a large number of weapons, ammunition and military equipment: six guns, 268 machine guns and 2,024 hand machine guns, 125 mortars, five grenade launchers, five flamethrowers, 74 PTR, 4968 submachine guns, 17030 rifles and pistols, 30,490 grenades, 7,385 mines, nearly three million rounds of ammunition, 31 radio stations, and seven printing presses.^[118]

UPA propaganda poster, 1948. Text: Freedom to nations, freedom to people

Contacts with the special services of the West

Following a March 1946 speech by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declaring the beginning of the Cold War, the OUN, like other anti-Soviet liberation organizations in Eastern Europe, came under the scrutiny of British and US intelligence services. OUN-B supporters were especially active in these contacts. Hoping for a split in the anti-Hitler coalition and an imminent war between the United States and Britain, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union, on the other, they seriously hoped that World War III would bring freedom and independence to Ukraine.

By 1947, about 250,000 Ukrainians were in IDP camps in the western occupation zones of Germany, Austria, and Italy. Many of these people were members or sympathizers of the OUN. After 1947, UPA fighters began to penetrate the American-occupied zone through Czechoslovakia. Camps for displaced persons became a place for the spread of ideas of Ukrainian nationalists, and Stepan Bandera set about the task of establishing control over Ukrainian emigrant circles.

One of a number of secret CIA operations against the USSR, conducted in cooperation with the secret services of Great Britain, Italy, and Germany, was called "Aerodynamics". Its essence was that the CIA provided funding and training for UPA soldiers, provided training bases and instructors, and later dumped (landed) insurgents on Soviet territory. There they were asked to collect a variety of intelligence: data on military and industrial facilities, the location of military units, their names, weapons, equipment, location of airfields, length of runways, types of aircraft and their number, the exact location of the party and administrative buildings, location of railway stations, transport, the mood in the army and the people, and also to recruit new members for OUN underground.^[131]

The operation as a whole failed. Most of the paratroopers were killed or captured, some were recruited by the Soviet secret services, and they soon began airing, providing Western intelligence with disinformation. For example, after a group of paratroopers led by a member of the OUN-B and Bandera's godfather, Myron Matvieiko, seized a group of paratroopers in June 1951, they "met" nine more OUN groups in the following weeks and months, capturing 18 people. destroyed, and 26 taken prisoner. At the same time, five of the prisoners showed readiness to cooperate with the MGB. And after a while, radio operators led by Matvieiko began to supply the West with radiograms with misinformation. They later practiced for another 10 years.^[132]

On March 17, 1951, the UPA appealed to the US government to assist Ukrainian insurgents in the fight against the USSR.^[133]

Reports of the destruction of power plants in Lviv and the Korsun-Shevchenkivskyi district by UPA soldiers in December 1946

In January 2017, the CIA declassified a large amount of material relating to the CIA's relations with Ukrainian nationalists. American spies contacted the leadership of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) immediately after the war, in the second half of the 1940s; and this connection was broken only in the early 90's, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of the earliest documents dates back to April 1947. The report on terrorist acts committed on the territory of Ukraine states that a power plant was blown up in Lviv and a hydroelectric power plant in the Korsun-Shevchenkivskyi district. A large number of civilian casualties had been reported.^[134]

The final suppression of the insurgency

The losses suffered by the Ukrainian underground in the second half of the 1940s were difficult to compensate. After the early 1950s, only deep-seated OUN militants fought. Fighting them increasingly turned into "sudden attacks". During the transitions, the guerrillas pretended to be local peasants, had with them various household tools - axes, saws, or fishing rods. They watered their tracks with kerosene, sprinkled with tobacco or pepper, moved along the bottom of rivers and streams, or went out on roads where there was heavy traffic - all to deceive the pursuit, which conducted a search using dogs. The activity of the underground fell, but this did not prevent it from carrying out operations from time to time. A defiant action, for example, was organized on July 10, 1951, in Nadvirna. At around 11 pm, guerrillas stormed a local hospital, killing two MGB guards who were watching a wounded OUN activist, taking the woman away and fleeing.^[135]

In March 1950, UPA Commander-in-Chief Roman Shukhevych was killed.^[136]

In 1952, the Khmelnytsky Oblast State Security Service liquidated two OUN guerrilla groups in the Kyiv Oblast and three in the Vinnytsia Oblast. It is worth noting that the Soviets managed to create a fictitious OUN leadership in this area under the leadership of Agent "N-26", against members of the underground, he spoke under the pseudonym "Skob". Subsequently, "N-26" played an important role in the liquidation of the OUN Central Committee.^[137]

As of March 17, 1955, there remained a total of eleven small UPA groups in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR, with a total of 32 members, 17 single underground activists, and 50 illegals. Although so many insurgents were no longer able to respond adequately to the repressive measures of the Soviet government, in 1955-1956 they carried out 35 actions, including 10 assassinations and 15 attempted assassinations.^[138]

In July 1955, after a 10-hour battle in the village of Sushky, the last OUN militia in the Zhytomyr region, consisting of two underground fighters, was destroyed.^[139] The last active group of the OUN, consisting of three people, was physically liquidated by the KGB in April 1960 in the Ternopil region.^[140]

On the other hand, between 445,000 and 500,000 residents of the western regions of Ukraine were killed, arrested, or deported as a result of repression by the secret services to suppress the UPA. The number of dead alone reached more than 155,000 insurgents, and the number of deportees reached 203,662, so Soviet repression, accompanying the struggle against the underground, affected every tenth inhabitant of Western Ukraine.^[141]

In battles with the UPA in 1944–45, the NKVD captured more than 300 German servicemen (mostly Abwehr and Gestapo officers) who remained in the insurrection. The Germans remained until the end of January 1947, when the OUN Security Council purposefully liquidated them so as not to compromise the movement to the West.^[142]

Stepan Bandera, was assassinated in October 1959 in Munich by KGB assassin Bohdan Stashynsky on the orders of Nikita Khrushchev.

After the war, western Ukraine was annexed into the Soviet Union and 570, 826 people were deported, including OUN-UPA family members, to other regions of USSR without permission to return.^[143]