Monday, July 11, 2022

What the Volyn Massacres (genocide) of 1943 tell us about the danger of Radical Ukrainian Nationalists & Neo-Nazis and the current agendas of those who support them.

What the Volyn Massacres (genocide) of 1943 tell us about the danger of Radical Ukrainian Nationalists & Neo-Nazis and the current agendas of those who support them. 

Greg Krasovsky
July 11, 2022
 
To follow up my Facebook post on the Volyn Massacres (genocide) in Western Ukraine (Poland until 1939) which peaked in July of 1943:
 
Please read the below article from Live Journal on the massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.
 
It's gruesome, but true history.
 
Then I hope you'll understand why at least those who remember & understand history and would not betray the memory of victims from the Volyn Massacre and the Holocaust, such as

- Poles,
- Ukrainian Jews,
- Ethnic Russians, and
- Ethnic Ukrainians [1]

 
would never support the resurgence of radical Ukrainian Nationalism and would do everything in their power to eradicate it.  

For those of you who don't know, radical Ukrainian nationalists have been committing numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine with the direct or tacit approval of the Ukrainian government (while the West -- USA and its EU / NATO allies -- turned a blind eye) from the spring of 2014 to present!

1. Why? 

Because they hate ethnic Russians, ethnic Ukrainians who are friendly to ethnic Russians and/or the Russian Federation.

2. How?

Through

- paramilitary units
- military units
- Nationalist / supremacist NGOs
- membership in and under the authority of Ukrainian military, police, national guard units and security services

By

- Threats,
- Beatings,
- Robbery,
- torture & sexual assault,
- manslaughter & murder
- kidnappings,
- false imprisonment,
- selective prosecution
- imprisonment
- vandalism, destruction and confiscation or theft of property

- shelling & bombing of civilian areas and infrastructure
- using civilians as human shields
- setting up mortars & sniper nests as well as tanks & artillery in or next to civilian housing, schools, and even medical facilities,
 
- targeted killing of civilians by snipers, mortars, artillery, tanks & armored personnel carriers, and aviation.

- violation of Geneva conventions by torturing and killing prisoners of war (enemy combatants)

  
3. Where?

(a) Kyiv / Kiev during the Euromaidan protests and the violent overthrow of President Yanukovich's government 


(b) Odessa on May 2, 2014,  
 

(c) the Donetsk Coal Basin region of Eastern Ukraine (Donbass), including the Donetsk and Lugansk regions (districts) of Ukraine.
 

(d) Other Ukrainian cities where perceived anti-Ukrainian Nationalist or pro-Russian activists where targeted.

 
So is it any wonder that a good portion of the population who remained in towns & villages of Donbass and neighboring regions (Kharkov, Zaporozhye and Kherson) that have now been taken over by Donetsk and Lugansk insurgents and/or the Russian military, welcome these troops with open arms, call them liberators and telling them that they have been waiting for eight (8) years to be freed from living under the yoke of Radical Ukrainian nationalists and blatant Neo-Nazis, like members of the infamous Azov battalion?
    

Here's what's more disturbing:
 
1. Why did Western (US/EU/NATO) governments, their military & intelligence agencies and their diplomatic corps 


    - turn a blind eye on this
    - tacitly encourage it
    - aid & abet it by proving political & media support, funding, training, weapons & equipment 

to groups, organizations & units known to have been engaged in such crimes and human rights violations?

2. Why aren't you hearing about this in corporate or state-owned Western main-stream media?

The answer is easy!

(a) Because these radical Ukrainian nationalists, their organizations and their racist, xenophobic, fascist and russophobic ideology, policy and actions have been aimed at Russia and its supporters in Ukraine (ethnic Russians & Ukrainians who are friendly to Russians, their language & culture and Russia as a country).

(b) Ukraine and Ukrainian Nationalists have been used as pawns in an effort to bring Russia under control of the US and its EU / NATO allies.

How do you bring Russia under US/EU control?


(i) Through forcing the current Russian government (by political, economic and military means) to be subordinate and comply with US/EU policies and demands,

(ii) By replacing the current Putin-led and controlled Russian government (regime change through political, economic and military means) with a new government that's subservient to US/EU/NATO interest!

Why do you need to bring Russia under control NOW?

(i) Russia has

- oil & natural gas (leading energy exporter)

- arable land that produces grains & other foods (leading wheat exporter),
 
- metals & minerals,

- precious metals & stones (leading gold & diamond miner and exporter)

- fresh water supplies

- lumber
 
- land corridor from China to Europe (10-15 days by train)

- water corridor (northern Arctic route ensure by nuclear icebreakers) from Asia to Europe

- educated population with good work ethic (human resources)

- a multi-ethnic & multi-confessional population that lives in peace and appeals to Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and other confessions, nationalities and races around the world.

- no negative colonial history of exploitation in Asia, Africa, Pacific or the Americas,
 
- leading military, space technologies  & nuclear arsenal

- leading manufacturer & exporter of nuclear power stations

- leading scientific research institutions, including medical research

   
 
(ii)  China becomes unbeatable politically, economically and militarily --
as long as Russia remains an independent junior partner and ally of China.

 
(iii) This means that the US and the EU (population of +700 million) can / will lose their dominant economic, political and military position to China, Russia and their allies (e.g. BRICS countries with a total population exceeding 3 billion people)
 
(iv) This means that the US-EU based trans-national financial-industrial groups (FIGs) that control 

- leading corporations, 

- US/EU political parties and individual politicians, 

- senior government officials and governments (including their military forces & intelligence agencies), 

- mass media, 

- social media (via Big Tech) and 

- entertainment industries,

may not be able to control, compete with or even resist losing their market position and assets to competing independent FIGs from China, Russia and other BRICS countries who could / would utilize the political, economic and military support of their governments in furthering their business interests in the USA, EU and other countries.
 
We're talking about trillions of Dollars & EUROs in business and assets at stake:

- income from consumers
    -- oil & gas, energy
    -- food & other consumer goods
    -- medical services & products (drugs & equipment)
    -- communications
    -- transportation services
    -- IT services

- income from employees (human resources)

- income from tax-payers through
    -- financing governments
    -- subsidies from governments
    -- government contracts
        --- health, education, transportation, etc.
        --- military-industrial complex contracts (weapons, equipment & services)
        --- intelligence, national security, law enforcement contracts
        --- criminal justice contracts (private prisons & other services monitoring prisoners, those on probation, parole or under surveillance)  
 
- income from extracting resources on government-owned land & water resources
     -- oil & gas
     -- metals & mining
     -- agricultural products grown on government-owned lands

- income or savings from favorable import-export regimes  
    -- customs duties /tariffs
    -- import/export subsidies / financing

- income from monopolies or cartels tolerated by friendly (controlled) governments   
 
Now do you understand what's at stake (trillions!) and why
 
   - the US/EU/NATO governments are willing to support Radical Ukrainian Nationalists and even Neo-Nazis in the current battle to weaken, contain, control and even take over Russia?
 
   - the Western Mainstream Media and Social Media are trying to show us only

      -- a favorable (false) perspective on radical Ukrainian Nationalists & Neo-Nazis

      -- a perspective that hides, ignores or down-plays the role of US/EU/NATO governments in developing, supporting and directing Radical Ukrainian Nationalists and Neo-Nazis in their anti-Russian activities, including
     (i) gross /severe human rights violations,
     (ii) war crimes & crimes against humanity
     (iii) terrorist acts

      -- an anti-Russian perspective on the Ukrainian conflict since 2014?
 
--

[1] Residents of Ukraine who oppose(d) the racist, xenophobic, russophobic and fascist ideology of radical Ukrainian nationalists like Stepan Bandera and his compatriots in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the Ukrainian SS Division Galicia and all the Ukrainian Police battalions that served Nazi Germany during WWII and had a vital role in the exterminating Jews, Poles, Gypsies and Russians who lived for many centuries in Ukraine.
 
***

What did the Bandera people do during the Great Patriotic War .... Volyn tragedy ....
 
victor_shyaga
May 21 2022, 09:40
 
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&sl=ru&tl=en&u=https://victor-shyaga.livejournal.com/3364.html  
 
***
 
Those who don't learn their history are bound to repeat it.


Greg Krasovsky
Facebook

July 11, 2022 

The Volyn massacres (genocide) during WWII should have taught us to never underestimate the danger of radical nationalists / supremacists.

This includes past and present radical Ukrainian nationalists, neo-Nazis and supporters of Ukrainian Nazi war criminals and collaborators.

If you want to get a good sense of what happened in Volhynia during World War II , then please watch the movie Volhynia (see below).

https://www.facebook.com/greg.krasovsky/posts/pfbid02xeFBHDXV8LHVBJYo1sPHdhw2beMbzxd9jrTdJMTbo9Rb3fzjrV7tg5cgzXveGnJ9l
 
***
 
[Google Translation]
 
What did the Bandera people do during the Great Patriotic War .... Volyn tragedy ....
 
victor_shyaga
May 21 2022, 09:40
 
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&sl=ru&tl=en&u=https://victor-shyaga.livejournal.com/3364.html
 
 Volyn Massacre (Polish: Rzez wolynska) is an ethno-political conflict, accompanied by the mass destruction of the ethnic Polish civilian population and civilians of other nationalities, including Ukrainians, by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the OUN (b) (Bandera) in the territories of the Volyn-Podolia district, which until September 1939 was under Polish administration, begun in March 1943 and peaked in July of that year.

 In the spring of 1943, large-scale ethnic cleansing began in Volyn, occupied by German troops.  This terrible inhuman criminal act was carried out not by the Germans, but by the militants of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, who sought to “cleanse” the territory of Volhynia from the Polish population ....

Ukrainian nationalists surrounded Polish villages and colonies, and then proceeded to kill.  

They killed everyone - women, the elderly, children, infants.  The victims were shot, beaten with clubs, chopped with axes.  



Then the corpses of the destroyed Poles were buried somewhere in the field, their property was robbed, and finally the houses were set on fire.  

In place of the Polish villages, only charred ruins remained ....

They also destroyed those Poles who lived in the same villages with the Ukrainians.  It was even easier - there was no need to collect large detachments.  

Groups of OUN members of several people passed through the sleeping village, entered the houses of the Poles and killed everyone.  

And then the locals buried the killed fellow villagers of the “wrong” nationality.  In this way, several tens of thousands of people were killed, whose only fault was that they were not born Ukrainians ....

 At present (since 1992), the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists calls itself the successor to the OUN(b).  

In the course of the “Map” study conducted in Poland, it was found that as a result of the actions of the UPA-OUN (B) and the Security Council of the OUN (b), in which part of the local Ukrainian population and sometimes detachments of Ukrainian nationalists of other movements took part, the number of Poles who died in Volhynia amounted to at least 36,543 - 36,750 people whose names and places of death were established.  

In addition, the same study counted from 13,500 to more than 23,000 Poles, the circumstances of whose death were not clarified.  

A number of researchers say that the victims of the massacre were probably about 50-60 thousand Poles, during the discussion about the number of victims on the Polish side, estimates were made from 30 to 80 thousand.  These massacres were a real massacre.

 An idea of her nightmarish cruelty of the Volyn genocide is given by a fragment from the book of the famous historian Timothy Snyder: “The first edition of the UPA newspaper, published in July, promised a “shameful death” to all Poles who remained in Ukraine.  

The UPA was able to carry out its threats.  Within about twelve hours, from the evening of July 11, 1943 to the morning of July 12, the UPA attacked 176 settlements ....  

During 1943, UPA units and special detachments of the OUN Security Service killed Poles both individually and collectively in Polish settlements and villages, as well as those Poles who lived in Ukrainian villages.  

According to numerous, corroborating reports, Ukrainian nationalists and their allies burned houses, shot or drove inside those who tried to flee, and those who could be caught in the street were killed with sickles and pitchforks.  

Churches full of parishioners were burned to the ground.  

In order to intimidate the surviving Poles and force them to flee, the bandits exhibited beheaded, crucified, dismembered or disemboweled bodies.  

Even the Germans were amazed at their sadism - gouging out eyes, ripping open stomachs and brutal torture before death were commonplace.  




They killed everyone – women, children… The genocide began in the cities.  

Men of the “wrong” nationality were immediately taken to prisons, where they were later shot ....

And violence against women took place right in broad daylight for the amusement of the public ....

There were many among Bandera who wanted to stand in line / take an active part ...

 Later, the Bandera people “got a taste” ....

 On February 9, 1943, Bandera from the gang of Pyotr Netovich, under the guise of Soviet partisans, entered the Polish village of Parosle near Vladimirets, Rivne region.  

The peasants, who had previously provided assistance to the partisans, warmly welcomed the guests.  After eating enough, the bandits began to rape women and girls.

 Before they were killed, their chests, noses and ears were cut off.

 Men were stripped of their genitals before they died.  Finished off with blows of an ax on the head.

 Two teenagers, the Gorshkevich brothers, who tried to call real partisans for help, had their bellies cut open, their legs and arms cut off, the wounds were abundantly covered with salt, leaving the half-dead to die in the field ....

 In total, 173 people, including 43 children, were brutally tortured in this village.  When the partisans entered the village on the second day, they saw in the houses of the villagers heaps of disfigured bodies lying in pools of blood ....

In one of the houses, on the table among the leftovers and unfinished bottles of moonshine, lay a dead one-year-old child, whose naked body was nailed to the boards table with a bayonet ....

The fiends put a half-eaten pickled cucumber into his mouth ....

 From the village of Volkovya one night, Bandera brought a whole family into the forest.  For a long time they mocked the unfortunate people.  Then, seeing that the wife of the head of the family was pregnant, they cut open her stomach, pulled the fetus out of it, and instead pushed in a live rabbit ....

 Bandera people often raped, mocked parents in the presence of children, and vice versa - they raped and mocked their daughters in the presence of their parents ....

Bandera liked to see how parents suffer, cry, how they turn gray before their eyes, how their heart breaks from the fact that their daughter is raped and slaughtered in front of their eyes....

 One night, the bandits broke into the Ukrainian village of Lozovaya.  Over 100 peaceful peasants were killed within 1.5 hours.  A bandit with an ax in his hands broke into the hut of Nastya Dyagun and hacked to death her three sons.  The smallest, four-year-old Vladik, cut off his arms and legs ....

 One of the two Kleshchinsky families in Podyarkovo was tortured to death by the OUN-UPA on August 16, 1943.  Family of four - wife and two children.  The victims' eyes were gouged out, they were hit on the head, their palms were burned, they tried to cut off the upper and lower limbs, as well as the hands, stab wounds were inflicted on the whole body, etc.

 The girl in the center, Stasya Stefanyak, was killed because of her Polish father.  Her mother Maria Boyarchuk, a Ukrainian, was also killed that night.  Because of the husband ....

Mixed families aroused particular hatred among Bandera ....

 In the village of Zalesye Koropetskoye (Ternopil region) on February 7, 1944, there was a terrible incident.  The UPA gang attacked the village with the aim of massacring the Polish population.  About 60 people, mostly women and children, were herded into a barn, where they were burned alive.  

One of those who died that day was from a mixed family - half Pole, half Ukrainian.  Bandera set him a condition - he must kill his Polish mother, then he will be left alive.  He refused and was killed along with his mother ....

 TARNOPOL, Tarnopol Voivodeship, 1943. One of the trees on the country road, in front of which the OUN-UPA terrorists hung a banner with the inscription translated into Polish: 

"The road to independent Ukraine."  And on each tree on both sides of the road, the executioners created the so-called “wreaths” from Polish children.

 “The old were strangled, and small children up to one year old by the legs - once, hit the head on the door - and it's ready, and on the cart.  We felt sorry for our men that they suffered hard during the night, but during the day they would sleep off and the next night - to another village.  There were people hiding.  If a man was hiding, they were mistaken for women ... ” (from interrogation of Banderovka [female Bandera OUN(B) / UPA  forces soldier])

 It should be noted that the Bandera people were very cowardly: if they were resisted, then they could, frightened, leave.  So in LIPNIKI (LIPNIKI), Kostopol county, Lutsk province, on March 26, 1943, during the attack of the OUN - UPA, the Pole Jerzy Skulsky saved his life thanks to the firearms he had ....

In general, this is the hallmark of Bandera - to crack down on unarmed people and run headlong at the sight of an armed man ....

 It should also be noted that modern Bandera to Ukraine do not openly admit that their deeds and great-grandfathers did all these horrors ....

But among themselves, at their sabbaths, parties, they discuss this, how they killed, tortured and mocked Poles, Jews, their grandfathers are Russians .... 



They like it that their great-grandfathers mocked people of other nationalities so much ...

My words that modern Bandera people like to mock and kill people, in particular, are confirmed by the fact that when in Odessa, many Odessans go to Kulikovo Field to honor the memory of the people who died there, then Ukrainian neo-fascists come there to make barbecue, turn on German music from the Second World War ....

well, they simply scoff and laugh at those whom they have already killed and burned, and at those who whom they have not yet killed and burned ....

If you give full rein to the current Bandera in Ukraine, then they, like their "valiant" grandfathers and great-grandfathers, will cut, kill, rape, burn alive people of a different faith, nationality, others  outlook on life...

 “..In Novoselki, Rivne region, there was one Komsomol member Motrya.  We took her to Verkhovka to the old Zhabsky and let's get a living heart.  Old Salivon held a watch in one hand, and a heart in the other, to check how much more the heart would beat in his hand)) "(From the interrogation of Banderovka)

 Many years later, the Bandera once again showed their true colors by arranging a terrible tragedy on May 2, 2014 in Odessa ....

Until now, these tragic events have not been investigated by the official Ukrainian authorities and no one has been punished for the terrible death of dozens of people ....

My relatives lived in Odessa .... They say that about 200 people died in total ....

It's just that all this is hidden by the official authorities of Ukraine ....

Many were killed not only in the House of Trade Unions and on Greek Square - people (Odessites), who had a different opinion than the Bandera people, were taken to the forest and there they were either simply beaten to a pulp or actually killed ....

 In Poland, the Volyn massacre is very well remembered.

 This is a scan of the pages of a book.  The list of ways in which the Ukrainian Nazis dealt with the civilian population:

 • Driving a large and thick nail into the skull of the head.

 • Ripping off the hair from the head with the skin (scalping).

 • Carving an “eagle” on the forehead (the eagle is the coat of arms of Poland).

 • Eye gouging.

 • Circumcision of the nose, ears, lips, tongue.

 • Piercing children and adults with stakes through and through.

 • Punching with a pointed thick wire through and through from ear to ear.

 • Cutting the throat and pulling the tongue out through the opening.

 • Knocking out teeth and breaking jaws.

 • Tearing of the mouth from ear to ear.

 • Plugging mouths with tow when transporting still living victims.

 • Turning the head back.

 • Crushing of the head by placing in a vise and tightening the screw.

 • Cutting and pulling narrow strips of skin from the back or face.

 • Breaking bones (ribs, arms, legs).

 • Cutting off women's breasts and sprinkling salt on wounds.

 • Cutting off the genitals of male victims with a sickle.

 • Piercing the belly of a pregnant woman with a bayonet.

 • Cutting the abdomen and pulling out the intestines in adults and children.

 • Cutting the abdomen of a woman with a long term pregnancy and inserting a fetus, such as a live cat, in place of the removed fetus and sewing up the abdomen.

 • Cutting the abdomen and pouring boiling water inside.

 • Cutting the stomach and putting stones inside it, as well as throwing it into the river.

 • Cutting open the belly of pregnant women and spilling broken glass inside.

 • Pulling out the veins from the groin to the feet.

 • Putting hot iron into the vagina.

 • Insertion of pine-cones into the vagina with the tip side forward.   
 
 • Inserting a pointed stake into the vagina and pushing it up to the throat, right through.

 • Cutting the front of a woman's torso with a garden knife from the vagina to the neck and leaving the entrails outside.

 • Hanging victims by the insides.

 • Inserting a glass bottle into the vagina or anus and breaking it.

 • Cutting open the belly and spilling feed flour inside for hungry pigs, which vomited this feed along with intestines and other entrails.

 • Chopping/cutting off with a knife/sawing off hands or feet (or fingers and toes).

 • Cauterization of the inside of the palm on the hot stove of a coal kitchen.

 • Cutting the body with a saw.

 • Sprinkling of bound feet with red-hot coal.

 • Nailing hands to the table and feet to the floor.

 • Chopping the whole body into pieces with an axe.

 • Nailing the tongue of a small child to the table with a knife, which later hung on it.

 • Cutting a child into pieces with a knife.

 • Nailing a small child to a table with a bayonet.

 • Hanging a male child by the genitals on a doorknob.

 • Knocking out the joints of the child's legs and arms.

 • Throwing a child into the fire of a burning building.

 • Crushing a baby's head by taking hold of its legs and hitting it against a wall or stove.

  • Planting a child on a stake.

 • Hanging a woman upside down on a tree and mocking her - cutting off her chest and tongue, dissecting her stomach, gouging out her eyes, and cutting off pieces of her body with knives.  

 • Nailing a small child to a door.  

 • Hanging on a tree with feet up and singeing the head from below with the fire of a fire lit under the head.

 • Drowning children and adults in a well and throwing stones at the victim
 
 •  Driving a stake into the stomach.
 
 • Tying a person to a tree and shooting him like a target.

 • Dragging the body along the street with a rope tied around the neck.
 
 • Tying the legs and arms of a woman to two trees, and cutting her stomach from the crotch to the chest.

 • Dragging on the ground mother with three children connected to each other.

 • Pulling together one or more victims with barbed wire, pouring cold water on the victim every few hours in order to come to his senses and feel pain.

 • Burying in the ground alive up to the neck and later cutting off the head with a scythe.

 • Tearing the body in half with the help of horses.

 • Tearing the body in half by tying the victim to two bent trees and then releasing them.

 • Setting fire to a victim doused in kerosene.

 • Laying around the victim with sheaves of straw and setting them on fire (Nero's torch).

 • Putting a baby on a pitchfork and throwing him into a fire.
 
 • Hanging on barbed wire.
 
 • Ripping off the skin from the body and filling the wound with ink or boiling water.
 
 • Nailing hands to the threshold of the dwelling.
 
 This article is 80% not mine.  I read it on the Internet and decided that it was necessary that as many people as possible read it ....

I could not read it to the end the first time ....

It's terrible what is described here ....

This horror there is no forgiveness, no understanding, let alone any justification ....

They say that there is no sin that God would not forgive with sincere repentance, repentance ....

I think that this is true ....

But my opinion is that those who committed these atrocities - they will never repent of their deeds ....

A creature capable of doing this is no longer a person ....

A person will not do this ...

Original text in Russian: https://victor-shyaga.livejournal.com/3364.html
 
***

[Google translation]

Alexander Aynetdinov
Facebook
July 11, 2022

https://www.facebook.com/ajnetdinov

Today is one of the blackest dates in world history.

On July 11, 1943, the "Bloody Sunday" of the Volyn Massacre began.

Ukrainian militants of the OUN-UPA detachments ruthlessly killed tens of thousands of civilians of Galicia: Poles, Russians and Jews.

Nowadays, this tragic event is usually hushed up, but “Country V” [Russia] remembers everything.

 At three o'clock in the morning on "Bloody Sunday" UPA units carried out a coordinated attack on almost 100 Polish settlements in Volhynia.

Not only Poles were killed, but also Russians and Jews.

 How exactly did this happen?  Volyn villages were blocked, after which massacres and destruction began.

Ukrainian militants tried not to waste bullets, because they chopped defenseless people with axes, cut them with knives and beat them with hammers.

After the end of the killings, the villages were burned to the ground.

 It is important to note that Ukrainian Nazism was not only incredibly cruel, but also cowardly.

It was precisely those villages where there were no German garrisons (and indeed armed people in general) that were chosen for the attack.

The scale and senselessness of the Ukrainian atrocities amazed even the Germans.

 The almost uninterrupted massacre of the Poles continued until 16 July.

 In total, in July 1943, more than 500 Polish villages were destroyed, about 20 thousand Poles were killed alone, which was the culmination of ethnic cleansing in Volyn.

 Surprisingly, the Ukrainian atrocity was not declared a genocide and was not even considered a crime during the Nuremberg trials.

After 70 years, Ukrainian Nazism returned.

But now Russia is standing in his way.

 @strana_vvv

***


Volhynia

Volhynia (/voʊˈlɪniə/ voh-LIN-ee-ə; Ukrainian: Волинь, romanized: Volyn'; Belarusian: Валынь, romanized: Vałyń; Polish: Wołyń [ˈvɔwɨɲ, ˈvɔwɨj̃]), is a historic region in Central and Eastern Europe, between south-eastern Poland, south-western Belarus, and western Ukraine.

The borders of the region are not clearly defined, but the territory that still carries the name is Volyn Oblast, in western Ukraine.

Volhynia has changed hands numerous times throughout history and been divided among competing powers. For centuries it was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

After Russian annexation all of Volhynia was part of the Pale of Settlement designated by Imperial Russia on its southwesternmost border.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volhynia?wprov=sfla1

***


Volhynia (Wołyń)

 Volhynia (Polish: Wołyń) is a 2016 Polish war drama directed by Wojciech Smarzowski.

The film is set in the 1939–1943 time frame and its central theme is Ukrainian anti-Polish hatred culminating in massacres of Poles in Volhynia.

The screenplay was based on the collection of short stories titled Hate (Polish: Nienawiść) by Stanisław Srokowski.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volhynia_%28film%29?wprov=sfla1

***

The massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia 

The massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia (Polish: rzeź wołyńska, lit. 'Volhynian slaughter'; Ukrainian: Волинська трагедія, romanized: Volynska trahediia, lit. 'Volyn tragedy'), were carried out in German-occupied Poland by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or the UPA, with the support of parts of the local Ukrainian population against the Polish minority in Volhynia, Eastern Galicia, parts of Polesia and Lublin region from 1943 to 1945.

The peak of the massacres took place in July and August 1943.

Most of the victims were women and children.

Many of the Polish victims regardless of age or gender were tortured before being killed; some of the methods included rape, dismemberment or immolation, among others.

The UPA's actions resulted in between 50,000 and 100,000 deaths.

According to Timothy Snyder, the ethnic cleansing was a Ukrainian attempt to prevent the post-war Polish state from asserting its sovereignty over Ukrainian-majority areas that had been part of the prewar Polish state.

Henryk Komański and Szczepan Siekierka write that the killings were directly linked to the policies of Stepan Bandera's faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) and its military arm, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, whose goal as specified at the Second Conference of the OUN-B on 17–23 February 1943 (March 1943 in some sources) was to purge all non-Ukrainians from the future Ukrainian state.

The massacres led to a wider conflict between Polish and Ukrainian forces in the German-occupied territories, with the Polish Home Army in Volhynia responding to the Ukrainian attacks, on a much smaller scale.

In 2008, the massacres which were committed by the Ukrainian nationalists against the Poles in Volhynia and Galicia were described by Poland's Institute of National Remembrance as bearing the distinct characteristics of a genocide, and on 22 July 2016, the Parliament of Poland passed a resolution recognizing the massacres as genocide.

This classification is disputed by Ukraine and some non-Polish historians. According to a 2016 article in Slavic Review, there is a "scholarly consensus that this was a case of ethnic cleansing as opposed to genocide".

Although Polish families, as the most numerous ethnic minority and in some areas majority, where the main target of the killings, victims also included Jews, Russians, Czechs, Georgians, and any Ukrainians who were part of Polish families or opposed the UPA and sabotaged the genocide by hiding Polish escapees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacres_of_Poles_in_Volhynia_and_Eastern_Galicia?wprov=sfla1
 
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