Dear Editor:
The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was one of the most heroic formations in Ukrainian history. It was formed in the middle of the Second World War to fight off the Nazi invaders in Western Ukraine. That specific anti-Nazi purpose is well documented in archives.
At that time, in 1943, many actors operated on a military level particularly in the Volhynia part of Western Ukraine. Besides the Nazis and the UPA there were Soviet partisans, the Polish Home Army, Polish Communist partisans and the advancing Red Army. Civilian victims included Ukrainian farmers and city dwellers, some Polish farmers-colonizers, and a few Jewish dwellers who joined a variety of formations to escape Nazi brutality and ultimate extermination. There were a number of Jews in the UPA.
It was a very chaotic time and place, primarily because the war was raging and so many military or paramilitary formations were operating. The Volhynia region was 90% Ukrainian with 9% Poles and 1% others. The number of Polish victims has been grossly exaggerated by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance and the current President of Poland Karol Nawrocki who used to chair that Institute.
The concept of ethnic cleansing to which the article refers was introduced in Western Ukraine by the Polish invaders in the late 1920’s. This was implemented through a strategy of pacification. This policy was later adopted by the Polish Home Army to establish ethnic boundaries for the period after the war when the Polish state was to be reinstated. In fact, it was uncertain who would prevail.
Polish civilians joined the Nazi police in droves. Ukrainian civilians quickly became disenchanted with Nazi policies which immediately manifested an anti-Ukrainian position. Ukrainian nationalist leaders were summarily arrested and interned in Concentration Camps. My own father, a Ukrainian nationalist, was arrested in September 1941 by the Nazis and interned until May 1945 in various Nazi concentration camps including Auschwitz.
The biggest problem with your September 28 article on the Polish-Ukrainian Historical Feud is that it is defamatory, containing absolutely no evidence or analysis, only slurs against Ukrainian heroes. Journalists should write about current events such as exhumations in Western Ukraine today, but without historical manipulation from any side. Please stick to the facts.
Ukrainian-Polish relations today are very important, to say the least.
In fact, they may be existential for both countries given Russian aggression and brutality. You do a disservice to both Ukraine and Poland by publishing unsubstantiated slurs which serve to divide. It benefits only Russia. The WSJ should know better.
One final thought. There is a village in today’s Poland which once was Ukrainian (Lemko) land. Its name is Pavlokoma. It’s a particularly interesting venue because in March 1945 it was the site of a massacre.
Ukrainians said that the Polish Home Army (PHA) had massacred 366 Ukrainian civilian residents. Poland did not deny the occurrence but rebutted the accusation, insisting that those were fatalities of the soldiers of the UPA, which had been fighting the PHA. I visited the grave site of the victims. Surprisingly enough, for the sake of transparency but, frankly, incriminating to the Poles, there was a monument with inscriptions including the names and dates of both birth and death of the interred. The predominant number had female names, and many showed their lifespan as being less than eight years.
I said to myself, how do you account for that and insist that this was not a massacre? My visit was recent. There was another reaction. How was this not covered up? How was this monument allowed to stand? But it was. There are good people everywhere among both nations. The Polish villagers of Pavlokoma let the monument with its damning inscriptions stand.
We should remember Volhynia 1943 and other places like Pavlokoma 1945, and we cannot forget Akcja Wisła 1947 when 150,000 Ukrainians were forcibly removed from their ancestral land which became a part of Poland after the War to newly acquired Polish lands once German to suit Polish homogeneity. We cannot and should not forget. But we need to move on. There is a great evil that threatens both nations and probably Europe and the world – Russian aggression. For the sake of future generations, let’s learn to heal wounds and work together.
Respectfully,
Askold S. Lozynskyj
September 26, 2026
The author is an attorney at law and former president of the Ukrainian World Congress