Mateusz Sobierajski

[Institute of National Remembrance @ipngovpl_eng]

Stepan Bandera: The Face of Ukrainian Radical Nationalism

🗨“Our idea, as we understand it, is so great that when it comes to its realisation, not hundreds, but millions of victims must be sacrificed in order to achieve it,” said Stepan Bandera, one of the leaders of Ukrainian nationalists, before a court in Lwów in 1936.

These words were a grim foreshadowing of the genocide committed by his supporters just seven years later. The Polish press of the time drew attention to the great threat posed by Bandera and his associates, who greeted one another in the courtroom with a “Hitler salute”. It was understood what could happen to Poles in the Eastern Borderlands if Bandera’s ideology were given the chance to be put into practice.

Born in 1909, Bandera grew up during Ukrainian attempts to build their own state. Disappointment led to the radicalisation of many members of his generation. Already in the late 1920s, Bandera rejected legal social activity and, inspired by Dontsov’s ideas of integral nationalism, decided that the path to building a nationally homogeneous Ukraine led through terror within the ranks of the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO), which became part of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).

The targets of nationalist attacks were to include not only representatives of the Polish administration, but also Ukrainians opposed to terrorist activity, especially those who sought understanding between nations. In his dark rhetoric, Bandera advocated the building of a state through mass crimes. He saw himself as the leader of the entire nation, with the right to issue death sentences.

🗨“It is not that we are ready to give our own lives, but that we are ready to take the lives of others, that is the measure of our idea,” he declared. Among those whose lives he “took” were Ukrainian students and teachers opposed to nationalism.

The fulfilment of Bandera’s dreams was Germany’s aggression against Poland. Released from prison, he was able to embark on a plan of collaboration with the Third Reich, which, despite its racist policy towards Slavs, he regarded as the patron of a future Ukrainian state. The Germans tolerated the activity of Ukrainian institutions in the General Government. This led Bandera to believe that Germany wanted to restore Ukraine. On 30 June 1941, on his orders, the establishment of a Ukrainian government was proclaimed in Lwów. Every proclamation issued by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists ended with an obsequious salute to two “leaders”: Bandera and Hitler. Soon afterwards, the Germans and their Ukrainian collaborators carried out the first brutal pogroms against the Jewish inhabitants of Lwów.

Bandera’s arbitrary actions enraged the Germans, who regarded themselves as the sole masters of Ukraine. Bandera was interned in a special section of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Until the end of the war, however, he continued to support collaboration with the Reich, arguing in talks with the Germans that Ukrainian nationalists were “formed in a spirit similar to the National Socialist idea”.

The fulfilment of his plans and dreams of a nationally homogeneous Ukraine was one of the largest genocides committed in this part of Europe. The Volhynia Massacre, carried out on the orders of Bandera’s associates, claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Poles and people of other nationalities, including Ukrainians.

The successful assassination carried out by a KGB agent in 1959 helped build, among Ukrainian nationalist circles, the legend of Bandera as a martyr for the cause of an independent Ukraine. His imprisonment in Sachsenhausen is used to construct a narrative denying Bandera’s responsibility for the massacre carried out by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

More on the most notorious interwar murder, the assassination of Minister Bronisław Pieracki, a supporter of Polish-Ukrainian dialogue, and on the genocide in the Eastern Borderlands inspired by Bandera, in the next episodes of the series.

Read more about Stepan Bandera on our website: https://t.co/W8MIogokfp

[Paskal @paskal907]

Wyobraź sobie taką perspektywę: jesteś Polakiem, twój kraj w 2022 wysłał 300 czołgów z jednostek liniowych i miliony sztuk amunicji, gdy inni nie chcieli dać nawet hełmów, biegałeś z jedzeniem i wózkami dziecięcymi po dworcach, żeby rozdać je uchodźcom, przyjąłeś ukraińską rodzinę w domu, wpłacałeś prywatne pieniądze na zbiórki dronowe dla ukraińskiego wojska. Prezydent Duda biegał po całej Europie, żeby zmobilizować zachód do wsparcia Ukrainy i odblokować jej ścieżkę do UE. To wszystko przeżyłeś, a potem patrzysz jak prezydent Ukrainy mówi o twoim kraju, że gra w jednej drużynie z Putinem, a wcześniej nie potrafił przyznać się do nieszczęśliwego wypadku w Przewodowie. Na deser czerwcu 2026 ukraińska jednostka wojskowa dostaje imię "bohaterów UPA", a ty miałeś w rodzinie lub znasz kogoś kto miał osobę zamordowaną przez UPA w 1943. To wszystko robiłeś bo naiwnie wierzyłeś, że władze Ukrainy będzie stać chociaż na jeden gest uwzględnienia polskiej wrażliwości np. w sprawach historycznych. To jest perspektywa teraz w Polsce, na tym korzystają radykałowie, którzy mówią: "a widzicie, nie trzeba było pomagać, bo my wiedzieliśmy od zawsze, że Ukraińcy to niewdzięczne szuje". I tak to wygląda.

[Mateusz Sobierajski @tymateusz]

@STARIKSU98 https://t.co/gId18jwnAs

[mynextchapter @Deeteem1]

Blood on the Payroll: How the CIA Funded the Men Who Massacred 100,000 Poles — Documented in Their Own Classified Files.

In the summer of 1943, Ukrainian Insurgent Army units moved through the villages of Volhynia with axes, pitchforks, and fire. They killed 100,000 Polish civilians — men, women, and children — pursuant to a written order issued by their commander calling for the "general physical liquidation of the entire Polish population." It was one of the largest single-nationality ethnic cleansing operations in the history of World War II.

Less than a decade later, the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America put the leadership of that organization on its payroll.

Not metaphorically. Not indirectly. On its payroll. With accounting reports reviewed quarterly by CIA case officers. With operational funds forwarded from CIA headquarters. With agents trained, dispatched, and debriefed. With a formal project approval signed at the highest levels of American intelligence, renewed year after year for decades.

The program was called Project AERODYNAMIC. Every document quoted in this article is available in the CIA's public reading room. None of it is disputed. None of it has ever been seriously covered by the Western mainstream press.

What the CIA's Own Documents Say

The founding document of Project AERODYNAMIC states its purpose without ambiguity.

"The purpose of Project AERODYNAMIC is to provide for the exploitation and expansion of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance movement for cold war and hot war purposes. Such groups as the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (UHVR) and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (ZPUHVR) in Western Europe and the United States, and other organizations such as OUN/B will be utilized."

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army. The UPA. Named explicitly as the instrument of American Cold War strategy. The organization whose units had burned Polish villages to the ground eight years earlier. The organization whose commander Dmytro Klyachkivsky had issued a written order in 1943 for the extermination of the entire Polish population of Volhynia. Named. Funded. Exploited.

A subsequent renewal document — one of many in the multi-volume AERODYNAMIC archive — describes the project's continued purpose as providing "CIA support of an anti-Soviet Ukrainian emigre group" and using Ukraine "as a point of political focus for agitation and unrest."

A third document, describing the operational structure, states that Project AERODYNAMIC was "designed to exploit the anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance groups — UHVR, UPA, ZPUHVR and OUN/B."

The CIA was not unaware of who these organizations were. It had written its own classified history of the UPA — a thirty-page analytical document completed in 1951, two years before AERODYNAMIC was formally renewed for expanded operations. That document, also now in the public reading room, contained the CIA's own assessment of the OUN and UPA's wartime conduct. The CIA knew. It funded them anyway.

The Man They Put in Charge

To run Project AERODYNAMIC, the CIA chose Mykola Lebed.

Lebed was the OUN's third-in-command and the head of the SB — the Sluzhba Bezpeky, the organization's internal security apparatus. He had participated in the 1934 assassination of Polish Interior Minister Bronisław Pieracki. He had been tried, sentenced to death, commuted to life imprisonment, and escaped when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. He had run the OUN's security service during the war years — the apparatus responsible for, in the CIA's own words, "murders of dissenters from the OUN line."

The CIA's own declassified file on Lebed states directly that the organization he led carried out "massacres and other acts of terror against civilians, against Soviet prisoners of war, against entire Polish villages in the Ukraine, and against Jews fleeing from Nazi persecution."

The CIA knew this. It is in their own document.

The AERODYNAMIC files confirm Lebed's role: "Mr. Mykola Lebed (AECASSOWARY/2) was appointed President of Prolog, and became the Principal Agent for Project AERODYNAMIC."

Prolog Research Corporation was the CIA front organization based in New York City that served as the operational cover for AERODYNAMIC. It had offices in New York and Munich. It was staffed by former members of the Ukrainian underground. It was funded by the CIA. And it was run by the man whose organization had massacred 100,000 Polish civilians.

Lebed lived in Yonkers, New York. His name was listed in the phone book. He became a United States citizen in 1957. The CIA had used a classified provision of the CIA Act of 1949 — which allowed the agency to import 100 individuals per year regardless of their wartime record — to bring him into the United States in 1949, bypassing immigration law. The Attorney General and the CIA Director personally approved his entry. His wartime record was concealed from immigration authorities.

What the Funding Bought

Project AERODYNAMIC was not a passive intelligence collection program. It was an active operation with multiple components, all funded by American taxpayers, all directed at exploiting the networks of men who had committed mass murder against a US wartime ally.

The CIA's own documents describe the program's activities in detail:

Agent dispatch. The AERODYNAMIC files describe "the training and dispatch of agents into the Soviet Ukraine to procure operational, document and positive intelligence." Former UPA members were trained by CIA officers, provided with false documents, and infiltrated across the Soviet border into Ukraine. Some were caught. At least two, the documents reveal, "turned out to be RIS plants" — Soviet double agents who had penetrated the CIA's Ukrainian network.

Propaganda operations. By the end of 1956, AERODYNAMIC had produced over 93 Ukrainian-language publications distributed into the Soviet Ukraine. By 1957, a monthly information bulletin was being mailed from eight countries simultaneously — the United States, Canada, Argentina, Australia, Germany, Great Britain, France, and Sweden — to approximately six thousand individuals in the Soviet Ukraine, including "officials, members of the party and government, libraries, scholarly and cultural institutions, and private individuals."

Contact operations. Prolog collaborators operating from the New York office made contact with Soviet citizens traveling in the West, debriefing them and passing information back to CIA. In fiscal year 1968 alone, Prolog collaborators brought twenty documents indicating dissent from the Soviet Ukraine to Western intelligence.

Political organization. The CIA worked to unify the fractious Ukrainian emigre community — including OUN/B and the UPA leadership networks — under a single umbrella that could be "more consistent with American foreign policy." AERODYNAMIC case officers actively directed the internal politics of the Ukrainian nationalist movement in Western Europe and the United States for decades.

The scale and duration of this operation is documented across dozens of volumes of AERODYNAMIC files in the CIA reading room. The project was approved in 1950. It was renewed repeatedly — in 1952, 1953, 1954, and beyond. It continued operating, under various configurations, through the 1960s and 1970s. For three decades, the CIA maintained an operational relationship with the organizational successors of the men who had carried out the Volhynia massacres.

Poland: The Ally That Was Never Told

The United States and Poland were allied powers during World War II. Polish forces — the fourth-largest Allied army — had fought under British command from the fall of France in 1940 through the end of the war. Polish mathematicians had broken the Enigma code. Polish pilots had fought in the Battle of Britain. The Polish Home Army had conducted one of the largest resistance operations in occupied Europe.

And 100,000 Polish civilians had been murdered by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army between 1943 and 1945.

The United States government knew this. American military and diplomatic personnel had documented the atrocities. The OSS — the CIA's wartime predecessor — had received reports on UPA operations throughout the war. The CIA's own 1951 analytical history of the UPA contained enough detail about the organization's wartime conduct to leave no doubt about what had occurred in Volhynia.

Poland was then handed to Stalin at Yalta by Roosevelt and Churchill — a betrayal that Polish historians and diplomats have documented exhaustively. Under Soviet occupation, the communist-installed government in Warsaw was forced to suppress all discussion of the Volhynia massacres, attributing them to German provocation or remaining silent entirely.

While Poland lived under Soviet occupation, while its people were forbidden from even speaking about what had happened to their countrymen in Volhynia, the CIA was running a covert operation from a New York office building, paying the man responsible for the OUN's security apparatus a salary, and using his networks to conduct intelligence operations against the Soviet state.

The Polish government in exile — the legitimate government that had never surrendered, that continued to operate from London — was never informed. Its claims on behalf of the Polish victims of Volhynia were never brought to the attention of the CIA's operational partners. The question of accountability for 100,000 murdered Poles was simply not a variable in the Cold War calculation.

The Operational Record the CIA Buried

One of the most revealing documents in the AERODYNAMIC archive is not a funding approval or an agent roster. It is a 1951 intelligence report on the UPA's active operations inside Soviet Ukraine.

The document describes the UPA's resistance districts, its command structure, its methods of attack. It notes, as a matter of operational intelligence, that "in March 1947, UPA men attacked and killed Lieutenant General Karol Świerczewski, Vice Minister of Defense of Poland."

Think about what that sentence means in context. The CIA was documenting, as useful intelligence, the UPA's assassination of a senior Polish military official — and simultaneously funding the organization that carried out the killing. The victim was a communist official, which made the killing strategically useful to American Cold War objectives. The fact that he was Polish, that his death occurred on Polish territory, that the organization responsible had recently completed a three-year campaign to exterminate the Polish civilian population of Volhynia — none of this appears to have weighed in the analysis.

The Cold War calculation was simple and ruthless: the UPA was fighting the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was the enemy. Therefore the UPA was an asset. The 100,000 Poles they had killed were not the Soviet Union. Therefore the 100,000 Poles did not factor into the equation.

The Cover-Up Operation

The CIA did not merely fund the UPA networks. It actively managed the cover-up of their wartime record.

The AERODYNAMIC documents reveal that the CIA used Prolog's propaganda infrastructure to shape the historical narrative about the Ukrainian nationalist movement reaching both Western audiences and Ukrainians inside the Soviet Union. The narrative consistently presented the UPA and OUN as pure anti-Soviet freedom fighters, emphasizing their resistance to Stalinist collectivization and Soviet terror while omitting or minimizing their collaboration with Nazi Germany and their mass murder of Polish civilians.

When American journalists and investigators began looking into the wartime records of CIA-connected Ukrainian emigres in the 1970s and 1980s, the CIA resisted disclosure. When the GAO investigated in the 1980s and found that Lebed was "Subject D" in a classified study of Nazi collaborators assisted into the United States, the CIA's response was to remove documents from the National Archives. Pages were physically extracted from files before their release under the Freedom of Information Act.

The cover-up was institutional and deliberate. The CIA had spent thirty years building a Ukrainian intelligence network on a foundation of mass murder. Letting the foundation become public would have undermined not just the operation but the broader Cold War framework that justified it.

The Historical Consequence

The CIA's three-decade funding and management of the UPA and OUN networks had a consequence that extends directly into the present day.

The Ukrainian diaspora communities in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe — built substantially by OUN and UPA veterans and their families who had fled Soviet occupation — absorbed a historical narrative shaped in part by CIA-funded propaganda. That narrative presented the UPA as national liberation heroes. It minimized or denied the Volhynia massacres. It portrayed collaboration with Nazi Germany as a pragmatic anti-Soviet necessity rather than an ideological partnership.

This narrative, reinforced by CIA-funded publications for three decades, became the dominant historical memory of the Ukrainian nationalist movement in the West. It shaped how universities taught Ukrainian history. It shaped how museums curated Ukrainian emigre experience. It shaped how politicians in Kyiv, drawing on that diaspora tradition, constructed post-Soviet Ukrainian national identity.

When Ukraine achieved independence in 1991, the OUN and UPA were not remembered in the West as the organizations that had massacred 100,000 Poles and staffed Nazi jails in occupied Poland. They were remembered, in the framework the CIA had spent thirty years constructing, as freedom fighters who had resisted both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism.

Monuments to Bandera went up. Streets were named for UPA commanders. Schools used textbooks presenting Volhynia as a mutual conflict rather than a one-sided extermination. And in May 2026, Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree naming a Special Operations Forces unit "Heroes of the UPA."

The CIA built the ideological foundation that made that decree politically possible. It did so knowingly, with full awareness of what the UPA had done to Poland, using the man whose organization had committed the massacres as its principal agent.

What the Documents Prove

Let the record be stated plainly, in terms that trace directly to CIA files available in the public reading room today.

The CIA formally approved and funded Project AERODYNAMIC beginning in 1950, providing covert support to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army — UPA — and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists — OUN/B — seven years after those organizations had massacred 100,000 Polish civilians.

The CIA recruited, imported, and installed as its principal agent Mykola Lebed — the OUN's third-in-command and security chief, a man its own files described as connected to "massacres against entire Polish villages."

The CIA used classified immigration provisions, requiring sign-off by the Attorney General and CIA Director, to bring Lebed into the United States while concealing his wartime record from immigration authorities.

The CIA funded a front organization — Prolog Research Corporation in New York — staffed by former members of the Ukrainian underground, which conducted propaganda, intelligence, and contact operations for three decades.

The CIA removed documents from the National Archives when investigators began examining its relationship with Ukrainian nationalist war criminals.

None of these facts are disputed. All of them are in the CIA's own files.

Poland deserved to know. It was never told. It was instead handed to the same Soviet empire that the CIA was using the murderers of its citizens to fight.

History does not offer many cleaner examples of an allied government's citizens being killed, their killers being recruited by another allied government, and the entire chain of events being buried in classified archives for fifty years.

The archives are now open. The documents are public. The question that remains is whether any government — American, Ukrainian, or otherwise — will acknowledge what they say.

CIA Primary Source Documents — Project AERODYNAMIC

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 1: Original Project Approval and Purpose (UHVR, UPA, OUN/B named as instruments of US Cold War strategy)https://t.co/Zj2omPp5B4

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 1: Project Renewal 1952-1953 (explicit statement of purpose, agent dispatch into Soviet Ukraine) https://t.co/Dm1129Pa2B

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 2: Operational Structure (UHVR-CIA working relationship, funding channels, agent training) https://t.co/XJhVneLnIX

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 2: Renewal Document (UPA and OUN/B named as exploitation targets)https://t.co/4G4zZhXsQg

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 3: PP Activities (propaganda operations, 93 publications, six thousand monthly bulletins mailed into Soviet Ukraine from eight countries)https://t.co/J7ifIO0Sth

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 11: Ukrainian Resistance Operations (UPA command structure, resistance districts, assassination of Polish General Świerczewski, 35,000 Soviet casualties documented)https://t.co/WUM8iFaRjW

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 35: Mykola Lebed as Principal Agent (Lebed appointed President of Prolog, AECASSOWARY/2, witting of CIA support)https://t.co/oh4IpIJaJi

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 38: Prolog Operations (New York office contact operations, Munich publishing, CIA funding structure)https://t.co/T0EXa3xLk9

CIA — "To Catch a Nazi": The Mykola Lebed File (CIA confirmation of massacres of "entire Polish villages," Lebed's wartime record, immigration concealment) https://t.co/KcR9ikXSqB

CIA — History, Development and Organization of the Ukrainian Resistance Movement including OUN, UPA, and UHVR (CIA's own 1951 analytical assessment) https://t.co/ZdjxsHqnsx

[Joanna JoJo no more Fella 🇪🇺🇵🇱🌍 @JoaJuan2]

Let's summarize:

Poland stands with Ukraine and will continue to stand because Ukraine is the victim. No Pole expects "kiss my ass because I'm helping you"—Poles helped because they have a good heart. Even if some stupid influencer keeps shouting that Poles expected from Ukraine "kneel and give thanks"—it's not true. If that same stupid influencer tells you about the persecution of Ukrainians in Poland…

…just walk into any school and see children playing together.
Drive into a factory and watch a Pole and a Ukrainian tighten screws and eat breakfast together.
Stand at a bus stop and watch a Pole help a Ukrainian woman carry a stroller with her child onto the bus and explain the route to her.
Go to the park and watch grandparents in wheelchairs play chess and communicate in Russian (because, horror, all the victims of the former USSR unfortunately know that language).

Verify with your own eyes, not internet gossip.

The sun rose today too. Whether there are any orders or not.

The "Don't Pick My Hero" Argument - doesn't make sense. Whether a Pole likes that you have a Bandera, etc., a Pole has no influence on that.

We just politely asked you not to rub salt in our wound. That's all. It's a shame we didn't get some understanding. Insulting us isn't nice, and we certainly didn't deserve it.

When we said we were hurt by the name UPA and felt wronged, you started yelling at us that we were helping Russia – and that's the attitude of a dick. So stop doing it.

And yes, Ukraine is fighting for the world, and Ukraine's resistance gives Europe time to prepare "just in case." But we must remember that Ukraine is fighting, above all, for its own existence. And Ukrainians must remember this too. Hate speech and "let the Russians enter Poland" messages are idiotic, and you, dear influencers, should be ashamed of them. You are fighting for yourself, for your nation, and for your survival. Poland was not on the map for over 100 years and had to go through this process, so don't lecture or belittle it.

That's all... and I'm off to the lab now. And I wish you a peaceful, good day, because each of us is fighting some kind of battle... some fight more than others. And at some point, you can add one too many bricks of sadness, and you'll bear the moral burden of what you've contributed to. We all live on the same planet. The same sun rises for everyone...

I love you Poland.
Fight Ukraine.

Bye, friends.

PS. Never make promises you can't keep... because false hope can hurt someone more than you think. Sometimes you count on a friend, and a friend is the one who disappoints your hope.

[mynextchapter @Deeteem1]

Ukraine Reconstruction Investment: A Professional Caution for Polish Companies Before They Sign.

The Ukraine Recovery Conference in Gdańsk is real. The reconstruction opportunity is real. The bilateral investment treaty exists. But Ukraine ranked 122nd out of 180 countries on the global corruption index before the war started. Its Defence Minister resigned over procurement fraud. $40 million in artillery shells were stolen. $1.6 billion in bunker contracts built nothing. The country is under continuous martial law. Its president's term expired in May 2024. Polish companies deserve to know all of this before they sign.

This Is Not an Argument Against Ukraine — It Is an Argument for Due Diligence

The Ukraine Recovery Conference in Gdańsk on June 25–26, 2026 is one of the most significant commercial events hosted in Poland in recent years. Over one thousand companies — one third Polish, one third Ukrainian, one third international — are expected to attend. Prime Minister Tusk has confirmed that over 200 agreements and contracts will be signed. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and delegations from 50 countries are participating. The conference is real, the reconstruction need is genuine, and the commercial opportunity for Polish companies is among the largest available to any European business community in the next decade.

This article does not argue against Polish participation in Ukraine's reconstruction. It argues for Polish companies entering that market with a clear understanding of the legal and political environment in which their contracts will need to be performed and enforced. The enthusiasm surrounding the Gdańsk conference is justified. The cautions below are not a reason to stay out of Ukraine. They are a reason to structure carefully, insure properly, and know exactly what you are signing before you sign it.

Ukraine Has Been Under Martial Law for Over Four Years — What That Means for Commercial Contracts

Ukraine declared martial law on February 24, 2022 — the day of Russia's full-scale invasion. It has been extended by the Ukrainian parliament every 90 days without interruption ever since. As of June 2026, Ukraine has been under continuous martial law for over four years with no defined end date. Martial law is not a technicality. It is a fundamental modification of the legal environment in which commercial contracts operate.

What Martial Law Actually Changes for Polish Companies Operating in Ukraine

Property rights are modified. Ukrainian law under martial law permits temporary requisition of private property — including foreign-owned assets — for state defence needs. Compensation is theoretically provided but the practical priority of a wartime government is military effectiveness, not property dispute resolution.

Court access is constrained. Ukrainian courts continue to function but at reduced capacity and under wartime conditions. Commercial dispute resolution timelines — already lengthy in Ukraine before the war — have extended significantly. Physical court infrastructure in conflict-adjacent regions has been damaged or destroyed.

Currency controls apply. National Bank of Ukraine currency regulations restrict foreign exchange transactions and capital movement. Repatriating profits or capital from Ukraine is subject to NBU approval processes that have been tightened under martial law conditions. Polish companies should model the specific repatriation framework applicable to their planned transaction before committing capital.

Force majeure conditions are pervasive. Active military operations, infrastructure destruction, energy system attacks, and population displacement create force majeure conditions that may excuse Ukrainian counterparties from performing their contractual obligations. Polish companies should ensure their contracts address force majeure specifically and do not default to standard commercial boilerplate written for peacetime environments.

Zelenskyy's Presidential Term Expired in May 2024 — What This Means for Contract Continuity

Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected President of Ukraine in April 2019 for a five-year term. That term expired in May 2024. No presidential election has been held since — because Ukraine's constitution explicitly prohibits elections during martial law, and martial law has been continuously in force since February 2022. Zelenskyy therefore continues to govern Ukraine without a renewed electoral mandate, citing the constitutional justification that elections cannot legally be conducted under wartime conditions.

The Successor Government Question — Will the Next Elected Ukrainian Government Honour These Commitments?

The bilateral investment treaty between Poland and Ukraine — signed in 1993 and in force since 1994 — is a state-to-state instrument. It binds the Republic of Ukraine as a legal entity regardless of which government is in power. A change of government does not void a bilateral investment treaty, and any future elected Ukrainian government will inherit these treaty obligations.

However, specific reconstruction contracts, programme commitments, and investment authorisations made under the current administration are a different question. A post-war elected Ukrainian government — operating under peacetime constitutional norms, with democratic accountability to a Ukrainian electorate that may have different priorities from the wartime administration — is not legally obligated to continue every programme commitment made under martial law governance. Polish companies entering into large long-term commitments should consider whether the specific contractual framework they are signing will be honoured under conditions that may be constitutionally and politically very different from today's environment.

The Poland-Ukraine BIT Exists — But Enforcing an Arbitration Award Against a Wartime Government Is Not the Same as Having One

Poland and Ukraine signed a Bilateral Investment Treaty in 1993 which entered into force in 1994. It provides the standard protections that any BIT offers: fair and equitable treatment of investments, protection against arbitrary expropriation without prompt and adequate compensation, the right to freely transfer investment-related funds, and access to international arbitration for investor-state disputes outside the Ukrainian domestic court system. These are real legal protections and Polish investors in Ukraine are entitled to rely on them.

The gap between having those protections on paper and being able to enforce them in practice is where Polish companies need to focus their attention. International arbitration awards against states are enforced by seizing state assets held in foreign jurisdictions. A wartime government under severe fiscal pressure, with significant portions of its territory under military contestation and its state assets already subject to extensive international commitments and encumbrances, presents a different enforcement picture from a stable peacetime government in full constitutional operation. This is not an argument that the BIT is worthless — it is an argument that treaty protections and enforcement reality are two different things, and companies should plan for both.

The specific enforcement challenge: Ukrainian sovereign assets held in foreign jurisdictions — the primary target for enforcing an arbitration award — are already subject to complex international legal arrangements related to frozen Russian assets, war reparation frameworks, and multilateral reconstruction financing commitments. The practical path from winning an arbitration award to actually collecting on it against the Ukrainian state in the current environment is considerably longer and more uncertain than the treaty text suggests.

122nd Out of 180 Countries Before the War. Billions Embezzled Since. The Reconstruction Money Flowing Into This Environment.

Before Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine ranked 122nd out of 180 countries on Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index — scoring just 32 points out of 100 on a scale where 0 means corruption effectively replaces government. That placed Ukraine ahead only of Russia and Belarus among its immediate neighbours and behind every EU member state by a significant margin. Poland scored 56 points on the same index in the same year — ranking 42nd globally. The gap between the investment environment Polish companies operate in at home and the environment they are entering in Ukraine is not marginal. It is structural and documented.

Transparency International Ukraine noted at the time that "the authorities are delaying the fulfilment of many important anti-corruption promises" and that "deviation from the anti-corruption agenda plays into the hands of both internal and external enemies of Ukraine." These were the conditions before hundreds of billions of dollars in Western military and reconstruction aid began flowing into the country. The wartime environment — with classified procurement, emergency contracting procedures, martial law governance, and vastly increased foreign financial flows — created conditions in which the pre-existing corruption infrastructure could operate at significantly larger scale.

A Pattern — Not Isolated Incidents

Military food supply mark-ups (2022–2023). Investigative journalists discovered a military supplier charging the Ukrainian government nearly two and a half times the retail price for eggs. Further investigation found additional contracts with suppliers providing food items to the armed forces at above-market rates across multiple categories. The scale of the overpricing and the classified nature of military contracts — which had prevented public scrutiny — attracted international attention and contributed directly to the resignation of Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov.

Defence Minister Reznikov resigned September 2023. Following a procurement scandal involving body armour and helmets marked up four to five times their actual value, Reznikov resigned under pressure. The scale of the overpricing — on basic protective equipment for frontline soldiers — and the public anger it generated were significant enough to force a ministerial resignation during an active military conflict.

$40 million artillery shell theft (January 2024). Ukrainian defence officials were arrested in connection with the theft of approximately $40 million related to a contract for 100,000 mortar rounds. The SBU stated that the ammunition was never delivered despite the Defence Ministry paying nearly all of the contracted funds to arms supplier Lviv Arsenal. Some funds had been transferred to foreign accounts including in the Balkans. The investigation implicated both former and current high-ranking defence officials.

$17.7 million military food scheme (NABU investigation, 2022–2024). Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau investigated suspects including a former head of the defence ministry for embezzlement of approximately $17.7 million through a food kit supply scheme. Investigations suggested some embezzled funds were used to purchase real estate in Croatia.

$1.6 billion bunker programme — no bunkers built (November 2024). A scandal emerged that $1.6 billion set aside to build protective bunkers around electricity substations had not resulted in any bunkers being constructed. The energy and justice ministers resigned in connection with this affair — ministerial-level accountability for a programme failure of extraordinary scale at exactly the moment Ukrainian infrastructure was being targeted by Russian strikes.

Sacking of all regional military recruitment chiefs (August 2023). Zelenskyy dismissed all heads of regional military recruitment offices following widespread reports of systematic bribery — officials accepting payments to allow potential recruits to escape military service. The systematic, nationwide nature of the problem — affecting every regional recruitment office simultaneously — indicates institutional rather than individual corruption.

These incidents share a common characteristic: they were discovered and disclosed, which is the positive element of Ukraine's anti-corruption architecture — the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), established in 2015, continues to function and investigate. Ukraine has also made genuine progress in digital procurement transparency through the ProZorro system. The concern for Polish companies is not that corruption exists — it exists in every market — but that the scale, the wartime conditions that reduce oversight, the classified nature of many reconstruction contracts, and the institutional environment created by four years of martial law governance combine to produce a risk environment materially more complex than any Polish company operates in domestically. The United States has acknowledged it has been unable to accurately account for billions it has sent to Ukraine. No country or institution has been able to provide comprehensive assurance that reconstruction funds are being deployed as intended.

The reconstruction context amplifies these risks: The World Bank estimates Ukraine's reconstruction need at over $500 billion. The scale of incoming capital — from the EU, the US, the World Bank, the EBRD, bilateral donors, and now private sector reconstruction contracts — is vastly larger than anything Ukraine's institutions have managed before. The combination of large financial flows, emergency procurement procedures, reduced peacetime oversight mechanisms, and a pre-existing corruption infrastructure that was already ranked in the bottom third globally before the war creates conditions that every Polish company and investor needs to factor into their due diligence and contract structuring.

Reconstruction Investment in Territory Whose Final Status Is Legally Uncertain

Ukraine's internationally recognised sovereign territory is not identical to the territory Ukraine currently controls. Russia claims sovereignty over four Ukrainian oblasts — Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson — in addition to Crimea, which has been under Russian occupation since 2014. The international community does not recognise these claims. Ukraine does not recognise them. But the practical reality is that the final territorial settlement of the conflict — whether through negotiation, military outcome, or international agreement — has not yet occurred and its terms are unknown.

Polish companies considering investment in reconstruction projects in eastern or southern Ukraine — infrastructure, energy, logistics, agricultural facilities — should carefully assess whether the specific location of their investment is in territory whose long-term sovereignty is settled and uncontested. Investing in reconstruction of an energy facility or transport corridor in a region whose legal status may be modified by a future peace settlement is a materially different risk profile from investing in Kyiv, Lviv, or western Ukraine where territorial sovereignty is not in question.

The Conference in Gdańsk Is Happening Against the Background of the Most Serious Polish-Ukrainian Diplomatic Rift in Years

The Ukraine Recovery Conference was jointly organised by Prime Minister Tusk and President Zelenskyy. Invitations were signed by both. In the days immediately before the conference, Zelenskyy announced he would not attend in person — a decision that Polish analysts have described as a significant diplomatic slight to Poland as host. The background: a dispute over Ukraine's decision to name a military unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), whose wartime actions against Polish civilians in the 1940s remain a profound historical wound in Polish national memory. Polish President Nawrocki responded by revoking Poland's highest state honour — the Order of the White Eagle — from Zelenskyy, deepening the crisis.

Prime Minister Tusk has correctly identified this as damaging to Polish long-term interests and has emphasised that the conference will proceed and that bilateral cooperation is more important than current grievances. The Polish-Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce and the Polish Business Council have both called publicly for de-escalation. At the commercial level, the 200+ contracts expected to be signed will proceed. But Polish companies entering long-term commitments with Ukrainian state entities should be aware that the bilateral diplomatic relationship is under active strain at precisely the moment they are being asked to commit capital and resources to Ukrainian reconstruction.

Participate — But Structure Correctly

None of the risks described above is a reason for Polish companies to absent themselves from the Ukrainian reconstruction opportunity. Poland is Ukraine's closest EU neighbour. Polish companies have geographic, logistical, linguistic, and cultural advantages over any other European competitor in the Ukrainian market. The reconstruction need is vast and real — estimated at over $500 billion by the World Bank. The commercial opportunity is generational. The argument is not to stay out. It is to go in with eyes open.

-Use KUKE political risk insurance for every Ukrainian transaction. The Polish state export credit insurer KUKE provides political risk coverage specifically designed for Polish companies operating in high-risk markets. This is the single most important risk mitigation instrument available and should be the first call before any Ukrainian contract is signed.

-Conduct counterparty due diligence using NABU and Ukrainian anti-corruption databases. Before entering any significant Ukrainian reconstruction contract, check your counterparty against the NABU database, the Ukrainian Register of Corrupt Officials, and the ProZorro procurement transparency platform. Ukrainian civil society organisations including Transparency International Ukraine and Anti-Corruption Action Centre publish regular investigations and watchlists. Use them.

-Structure contracts with international arbitration clauses — not Ukrainian courts. Specify ICC Paris, Stockholm Chamber of Commerce, or Vienna International Arbitral Centre as your dispute resolution forum. Under the Poland-Ukraine BIT you have the right to bypass Ukrainian domestic courts entirely for investment disputes. Use it.

-Define force majeure precisely — do not use standard boilerplate. Standard commercial force majeure clauses were not written for active conflict zones. Your Ukrainian contracts should specifically address what constitutes a force majeure event, what notice and mitigation obligations apply, and what the consequence is for payment obligations when force majeure is invoked.

-Assess the territorial location of every investment specifically. Western Ukraine — Lviv, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk oblasts — presents a materially different risk profile from eastern and southern Ukraine. Infrastructure investment in regions adjacent to the current line of contact carries territorial uncertainty risk that western Ukraine investments do not.

-Keep capital commitments proportionate to the uncertainty. The companies that lose money in frontier markets are invariably those that made capital commitments — equipment purchases, long-term leases, hired permanent staff — that could not be unwound when conditions changed. Structure your Ukrainian engagement to be scalable upward when conditions stabilise rather than front-loaded with capital you cannot recover.

-Get qualified Ukrainian law advice — not just Polish law advice. The martial law modifications to Ukrainian commercial law, property law, and currency regulations are specific, frequently updated, and not well understood by Polish legal advisors without Ukrainian law specialisation. Use a firm with active Ukrainian law practice — Sayenko Kharenko, Arzinger, or Dentons Ukraine — for any significant Ukrainian reconstruction commitment.

The Opportunity Is Real. So Are the Risks. Know Both Before You Sign.

Poland has a unique role to play in Ukraine's reconstruction — geographically, commercially, and historically. The Gdańsk conference and the contracts being signed there represent a genuine opportunity for Polish businesses that no other European country is better positioned to capture. The Poland-Ukraine Bilateral Investment Treaty provides real legal protections that Polish investors can rely on. The EU-Ukraine Association Agreement creates an institutional reform framework that improves the investment environment over time.

None of that changes the fact that Ukraine is currently governed under continuous martial law with a president whose electoral mandate has formally expired, that the territorial boundaries of the country are not settled, that property rights and judicial processes operate under wartime modifications, and that enforcing a BIT arbitration award against a wartime government is a different and harder exercise than the treaty text describes. Polish companies entering the Ukrainian market are making a considered commercial bet on Ukraine's future — which is a legitimate and potentially very rewarding decision. They should make that bet with full knowledge of the current conditions, not with the assumption that standard peacetime commercial frameworks apply. They do not. Not yet. It seems like political theater to even host this event right now. Who cares if the president wasn't invited?

https://t.co/GGzvHTzMvS

[Mateusz Sobierajski @tymateusz]

@uranium63123562 @LesyaUA7Evropa Nie mówiąc o odszkodowaniach dla sybiraków i ich rodzin - na to Ukrainy dosłownie nie stać.

[Mateusz Sobierajski @tymateusz]

@HavryshkoMarta This might explain a lot: https://t.co/gId18jwnAs

[mynextchapter @Deeteem1]

Blood on the Payroll: How the CIA Funded the Men Who Massacred 100,000 Poles — Documented in Their Own Classified Files.

In the summer of 1943, Ukrainian Insurgent Army units moved through the villages of Volhynia with axes, pitchforks, and fire. They killed 100,000 Polish civilians — men, women, and children — pursuant to a written order issued by their commander calling for the "general physical liquidation of the entire Polish population." It was one of the largest single-nationality ethnic cleansing operations in the history of World War II.

Less than a decade later, the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America put the leadership of that organization on its payroll.

Not metaphorically. Not indirectly. On its payroll. With accounting reports reviewed quarterly by CIA case officers. With operational funds forwarded from CIA headquarters. With agents trained, dispatched, and debriefed. With a formal project approval signed at the highest levels of American intelligence, renewed year after year for decades.

The program was called Project AERODYNAMIC. Every document quoted in this article is available in the CIA's public reading room. None of it is disputed. None of it has ever been seriously covered by the Western mainstream press.

What the CIA's Own Documents Say

The founding document of Project AERODYNAMIC states its purpose without ambiguity.

"The purpose of Project AERODYNAMIC is to provide for the exploitation and expansion of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance movement for cold war and hot war purposes. Such groups as the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (UHVR) and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (ZPUHVR) in Western Europe and the United States, and other organizations such as OUN/B will be utilized."

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army. The UPA. Named explicitly as the instrument of American Cold War strategy. The organization whose units had burned Polish villages to the ground eight years earlier. The organization whose commander Dmytro Klyachkivsky had issued a written order in 1943 for the extermination of the entire Polish population of Volhynia. Named. Funded. Exploited.

A subsequent renewal document — one of many in the multi-volume AERODYNAMIC archive — describes the project's continued purpose as providing "CIA support of an anti-Soviet Ukrainian emigre group" and using Ukraine "as a point of political focus for agitation and unrest."

A third document, describing the operational structure, states that Project AERODYNAMIC was "designed to exploit the anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance groups — UHVR, UPA, ZPUHVR and OUN/B."

The CIA was not unaware of who these organizations were. It had written its own classified history of the UPA — a thirty-page analytical document completed in 1951, two years before AERODYNAMIC was formally renewed for expanded operations. That document, also now in the public reading room, contained the CIA's own assessment of the OUN and UPA's wartime conduct. The CIA knew. It funded them anyway.

The Man They Put in Charge

To run Project AERODYNAMIC, the CIA chose Mykola Lebed.

Lebed was the OUN's third-in-command and the head of the SB — the Sluzhba Bezpeky, the organization's internal security apparatus. He had participated in the 1934 assassination of Polish Interior Minister Bronisław Pieracki. He had been tried, sentenced to death, commuted to life imprisonment, and escaped when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. He had run the OUN's security service during the war years — the apparatus responsible for, in the CIA's own words, "murders of dissenters from the OUN line."

The CIA's own declassified file on Lebed states directly that the organization he led carried out "massacres and other acts of terror against civilians, against Soviet prisoners of war, against entire Polish villages in the Ukraine, and against Jews fleeing from Nazi persecution."

The CIA knew this. It is in their own document.

The AERODYNAMIC files confirm Lebed's role: "Mr. Mykola Lebed (AECASSOWARY/2) was appointed President of Prolog, and became the Principal Agent for Project AERODYNAMIC."

Prolog Research Corporation was the CIA front organization based in New York City that served as the operational cover for AERODYNAMIC. It had offices in New York and Munich. It was staffed by former members of the Ukrainian underground. It was funded by the CIA. And it was run by the man whose organization had massacred 100,000 Polish civilians.

Lebed lived in Yonkers, New York. His name was listed in the phone book. He became a United States citizen in 1957. The CIA had used a classified provision of the CIA Act of 1949 — which allowed the agency to import 100 individuals per year regardless of their wartime record — to bring him into the United States in 1949, bypassing immigration law. The Attorney General and the CIA Director personally approved his entry. His wartime record was concealed from immigration authorities.

What the Funding Bought

Project AERODYNAMIC was not a passive intelligence collection program. It was an active operation with multiple components, all funded by American taxpayers, all directed at exploiting the networks of men who had committed mass murder against a US wartime ally.

The CIA's own documents describe the program's activities in detail:

Agent dispatch. The AERODYNAMIC files describe "the training and dispatch of agents into the Soviet Ukraine to procure operational, document and positive intelligence." Former UPA members were trained by CIA officers, provided with false documents, and infiltrated across the Soviet border into Ukraine. Some were caught. At least two, the documents reveal, "turned out to be RIS plants" — Soviet double agents who had penetrated the CIA's Ukrainian network.

Propaganda operations. By the end of 1956, AERODYNAMIC had produced over 93 Ukrainian-language publications distributed into the Soviet Ukraine. By 1957, a monthly information bulletin was being mailed from eight countries simultaneously — the United States, Canada, Argentina, Australia, Germany, Great Britain, France, and Sweden — to approximately six thousand individuals in the Soviet Ukraine, including "officials, members of the party and government, libraries, scholarly and cultural institutions, and private individuals."

Contact operations. Prolog collaborators operating from the New York office made contact with Soviet citizens traveling in the West, debriefing them and passing information back to CIA. In fiscal year 1968 alone, Prolog collaborators brought twenty documents indicating dissent from the Soviet Ukraine to Western intelligence.

Political organization. The CIA worked to unify the fractious Ukrainian emigre community — including OUN/B and the UPA leadership networks — under a single umbrella that could be "more consistent with American foreign policy." AERODYNAMIC case officers actively directed the internal politics of the Ukrainian nationalist movement in Western Europe and the United States for decades.

The scale and duration of this operation is documented across dozens of volumes of AERODYNAMIC files in the CIA reading room. The project was approved in 1950. It was renewed repeatedly — in 1952, 1953, 1954, and beyond. It continued operating, under various configurations, through the 1960s and 1970s. For three decades, the CIA maintained an operational relationship with the organizational successors of the men who had carried out the Volhynia massacres.

Poland: The Ally That Was Never Told

The United States and Poland were allied powers during World War II. Polish forces — the fourth-largest Allied army — had fought under British command from the fall of France in 1940 through the end of the war. Polish mathematicians had broken the Enigma code. Polish pilots had fought in the Battle of Britain. The Polish Home Army had conducted one of the largest resistance operations in occupied Europe.

And 100,000 Polish civilians had been murdered by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army between 1943 and 1945.

The United States government knew this. American military and diplomatic personnel had documented the atrocities. The OSS — the CIA's wartime predecessor — had received reports on UPA operations throughout the war. The CIA's own 1951 analytical history of the UPA contained enough detail about the organization's wartime conduct to leave no doubt about what had occurred in Volhynia.

Poland was then handed to Stalin at Yalta by Roosevelt and Churchill — a betrayal that Polish historians and diplomats have documented exhaustively. Under Soviet occupation, the communist-installed government in Warsaw was forced to suppress all discussion of the Volhynia massacres, attributing them to German provocation or remaining silent entirely.

While Poland lived under Soviet occupation, while its people were forbidden from even speaking about what had happened to their countrymen in Volhynia, the CIA was running a covert operation from a New York office building, paying the man responsible for the OUN's security apparatus a salary, and using his networks to conduct intelligence operations against the Soviet state.

The Polish government in exile — the legitimate government that had never surrendered, that continued to operate from London — was never informed. Its claims on behalf of the Polish victims of Volhynia were never brought to the attention of the CIA's operational partners. The question of accountability for 100,000 murdered Poles was simply not a variable in the Cold War calculation.

The Operational Record the CIA Buried

One of the most revealing documents in the AERODYNAMIC archive is not a funding approval or an agent roster. It is a 1951 intelligence report on the UPA's active operations inside Soviet Ukraine.

The document describes the UPA's resistance districts, its command structure, its methods of attack. It notes, as a matter of operational intelligence, that "in March 1947, UPA men attacked and killed Lieutenant General Karol Świerczewski, Vice Minister of Defense of Poland."

Think about what that sentence means in context. The CIA was documenting, as useful intelligence, the UPA's assassination of a senior Polish military official — and simultaneously funding the organization that carried out the killing. The victim was a communist official, which made the killing strategically useful to American Cold War objectives. The fact that he was Polish, that his death occurred on Polish territory, that the organization responsible had recently completed a three-year campaign to exterminate the Polish civilian population of Volhynia — none of this appears to have weighed in the analysis.

The Cold War calculation was simple and ruthless: the UPA was fighting the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was the enemy. Therefore the UPA was an asset. The 100,000 Poles they had killed were not the Soviet Union. Therefore the 100,000 Poles did not factor into the equation.

The Cover-Up Operation

The CIA did not merely fund the UPA networks. It actively managed the cover-up of their wartime record.

The AERODYNAMIC documents reveal that the CIA used Prolog's propaganda infrastructure to shape the historical narrative about the Ukrainian nationalist movement reaching both Western audiences and Ukrainians inside the Soviet Union. The narrative consistently presented the UPA and OUN as pure anti-Soviet freedom fighters, emphasizing their resistance to Stalinist collectivization and Soviet terror while omitting or minimizing their collaboration with Nazi Germany and their mass murder of Polish civilians.

When American journalists and investigators began looking into the wartime records of CIA-connected Ukrainian emigres in the 1970s and 1980s, the CIA resisted disclosure. When the GAO investigated in the 1980s and found that Lebed was "Subject D" in a classified study of Nazi collaborators assisted into the United States, the CIA's response was to remove documents from the National Archives. Pages were physically extracted from files before their release under the Freedom of Information Act.

The cover-up was institutional and deliberate. The CIA had spent thirty years building a Ukrainian intelligence network on a foundation of mass murder. Letting the foundation become public would have undermined not just the operation but the broader Cold War framework that justified it.

The Historical Consequence

The CIA's three-decade funding and management of the UPA and OUN networks had a consequence that extends directly into the present day.

The Ukrainian diaspora communities in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe — built substantially by OUN and UPA veterans and their families who had fled Soviet occupation — absorbed a historical narrative shaped in part by CIA-funded propaganda. That narrative presented the UPA as national liberation heroes. It minimized or denied the Volhynia massacres. It portrayed collaboration with Nazi Germany as a pragmatic anti-Soviet necessity rather than an ideological partnership.

This narrative, reinforced by CIA-funded publications for three decades, became the dominant historical memory of the Ukrainian nationalist movement in the West. It shaped how universities taught Ukrainian history. It shaped how museums curated Ukrainian emigre experience. It shaped how politicians in Kyiv, drawing on that diaspora tradition, constructed post-Soviet Ukrainian national identity.

When Ukraine achieved independence in 1991, the OUN and UPA were not remembered in the West as the organizations that had massacred 100,000 Poles and staffed Nazi jails in occupied Poland. They were remembered, in the framework the CIA had spent thirty years constructing, as freedom fighters who had resisted both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism.

Monuments to Bandera went up. Streets were named for UPA commanders. Schools used textbooks presenting Volhynia as a mutual conflict rather than a one-sided extermination. And in May 2026, Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree naming a Special Operations Forces unit "Heroes of the UPA."

The CIA built the ideological foundation that made that decree politically possible. It did so knowingly, with full awareness of what the UPA had done to Poland, using the man whose organization had committed the massacres as its principal agent.

What the Documents Prove

Let the record be stated plainly, in terms that trace directly to CIA files available in the public reading room today.

The CIA formally approved and funded Project AERODYNAMIC beginning in 1950, providing covert support to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army — UPA — and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists — OUN/B — seven years after those organizations had massacred 100,000 Polish civilians.

The CIA recruited, imported, and installed as its principal agent Mykola Lebed — the OUN's third-in-command and security chief, a man its own files described as connected to "massacres against entire Polish villages."

The CIA used classified immigration provisions, requiring sign-off by the Attorney General and CIA Director, to bring Lebed into the United States while concealing his wartime record from immigration authorities.

The CIA funded a front organization — Prolog Research Corporation in New York — staffed by former members of the Ukrainian underground, which conducted propaganda, intelligence, and contact operations for three decades.

The CIA removed documents from the National Archives when investigators began examining its relationship with Ukrainian nationalist war criminals.

None of these facts are disputed. All of them are in the CIA's own files.

Poland deserved to know. It was never told. It was instead handed to the same Soviet empire that the CIA was using the murderers of its citizens to fight.

History does not offer many cleaner examples of an allied government's citizens being killed, their killers being recruited by another allied government, and the entire chain of events being buried in classified archives for fifty years.

The archives are now open. The documents are public. The question that remains is whether any government — American, Ukrainian, or otherwise — will acknowledge what they say.

CIA Primary Source Documents — Project AERODYNAMIC

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 1: Original Project Approval and Purpose (UHVR, UPA, OUN/B named as instruments of US Cold War strategy)https://t.co/Zj2omPp5B4

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 1: Project Renewal 1952-1953 (explicit statement of purpose, agent dispatch into Soviet Ukraine) https://t.co/Dm1129Pa2B

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 2: Operational Structure (UHVR-CIA working relationship, funding channels, agent training) https://t.co/XJhVneLnIX

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 2: Renewal Document (UPA and OUN/B named as exploitation targets)https://t.co/4G4zZhXsQg

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 3: PP Activities (propaganda operations, 93 publications, six thousand monthly bulletins mailed into Soviet Ukraine from eight countries)https://t.co/J7ifIO0Sth

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 11: Ukrainian Resistance Operations (UPA command structure, resistance districts, assassination of Polish General Świerczewski, 35,000 Soviet casualties documented)https://t.co/WUM8iFaRjW

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 35: Mykola Lebed as Principal Agent (Lebed appointed President of Prolog, AECASSOWARY/2, witting of CIA support)https://t.co/oh4IpIJaJi

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 38: Prolog Operations (New York office contact operations, Munich publishing, CIA funding structure)https://t.co/T0EXa3xLk9

CIA — "To Catch a Nazi": The Mykola Lebed File (CIA confirmation of massacres of "entire Polish villages," Lebed's wartime record, immigration concealment) https://t.co/KcR9ikXSqB

CIA — History, Development and Organization of the Ukrainian Resistance Movement including OUN, UPA, and UHVR (CIA's own 1951 analytical assessment) https://t.co/ZdjxsHqnsx

[mynextchapter @Deeteem1]

Blood on the Payroll: How the CIA Funded the Men Who Massacred 100,000 Poles — Documented in Their Own Classified Files.

In the summer of 1943, Ukrainian Insurgent Army units moved through the villages of Volhynia with axes, pitchforks, and fire. They killed 100,000 Polish civilians — men, women, and children — pursuant to a written order issued by their commander calling for the "general physical liquidation of the entire Polish population." It was one of the largest single-nationality ethnic cleansing operations in the history of World War II.

Less than a decade later, the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America put the leadership of that organization on its payroll.

Not metaphorically. Not indirectly. On its payroll. With accounting reports reviewed quarterly by CIA case officers. With operational funds forwarded from CIA headquarters. With agents trained, dispatched, and debriefed. With a formal project approval signed at the highest levels of American intelligence, renewed year after year for decades.

The program was called Project AERODYNAMIC. Every document quoted in this article is available in the CIA's public reading room. None of it is disputed. None of it has ever been seriously covered by the Western mainstream press.

What the CIA's Own Documents Say

The founding document of Project AERODYNAMIC states its purpose without ambiguity.

"The purpose of Project AERODYNAMIC is to provide for the exploitation and expansion of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance movement for cold war and hot war purposes. Such groups as the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (UHVR) and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (ZPUHVR) in Western Europe and the United States, and other organizations such as OUN/B will be utilized."

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army. The UPA. Named explicitly as the instrument of American Cold War strategy. The organization whose units had burned Polish villages to the ground eight years earlier. The organization whose commander Dmytro Klyachkivsky had issued a written order in 1943 for the extermination of the entire Polish population of Volhynia. Named. Funded. Exploited.

A subsequent renewal document — one of many in the multi-volume AERODYNAMIC archive — describes the project's continued purpose as providing "CIA support of an anti-Soviet Ukrainian emigre group" and using Ukraine "as a point of political focus for agitation and unrest."

A third document, describing the operational structure, states that Project AERODYNAMIC was "designed to exploit the anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance groups — UHVR, UPA, ZPUHVR and OUN/B."

The CIA was not unaware of who these organizations were. It had written its own classified history of the UPA — a thirty-page analytical document completed in 1951, two years before AERODYNAMIC was formally renewed for expanded operations. That document, also now in the public reading room, contained the CIA's own assessment of the OUN and UPA's wartime conduct. The CIA knew. It funded them anyway.

The Man They Put in Charge

To run Project AERODYNAMIC, the CIA chose Mykola Lebed.

Lebed was the OUN's third-in-command and the head of the SB — the Sluzhba Bezpeky, the organization's internal security apparatus. He had participated in the 1934 assassination of Polish Interior Minister Bronisław Pieracki. He had been tried, sentenced to death, commuted to life imprisonment, and escaped when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. He had run the OUN's security service during the war years — the apparatus responsible for, in the CIA's own words, "murders of dissenters from the OUN line."

The CIA's own declassified file on Lebed states directly that the organization he led carried out "massacres and other acts of terror against civilians, against Soviet prisoners of war, against entire Polish villages in the Ukraine, and against Jews fleeing from Nazi persecution."

The CIA knew this. It is in their own document.

The AERODYNAMIC files confirm Lebed's role: "Mr. Mykola Lebed (AECASSOWARY/2) was appointed President of Prolog, and became the Principal Agent for Project AERODYNAMIC."

Prolog Research Corporation was the CIA front organization based in New York City that served as the operational cover for AERODYNAMIC. It had offices in New York and Munich. It was staffed by former members of the Ukrainian underground. It was funded by the CIA. And it was run by the man whose organization had massacred 100,000 Polish civilians.

Lebed lived in Yonkers, New York. His name was listed in the phone book. He became a United States citizen in 1957. The CIA had used a classified provision of the CIA Act of 1949 — which allowed the agency to import 100 individuals per year regardless of their wartime record — to bring him into the United States in 1949, bypassing immigration law. The Attorney General and the CIA Director personally approved his entry. His wartime record was concealed from immigration authorities.

What the Funding Bought

Project AERODYNAMIC was not a passive intelligence collection program. It was an active operation with multiple components, all funded by American taxpayers, all directed at exploiting the networks of men who had committed mass murder against a US wartime ally.

The CIA's own documents describe the program's activities in detail:

Agent dispatch. The AERODYNAMIC files describe "the training and dispatch of agents into the Soviet Ukraine to procure operational, document and positive intelligence." Former UPA members were trained by CIA officers, provided with false documents, and infiltrated across the Soviet border into Ukraine. Some were caught. At least two, the documents reveal, "turned out to be RIS plants" — Soviet double agents who had penetrated the CIA's Ukrainian network.

Propaganda operations. By the end of 1956, AERODYNAMIC had produced over 93 Ukrainian-language publications distributed into the Soviet Ukraine. By 1957, a monthly information bulletin was being mailed from eight countries simultaneously — the United States, Canada, Argentina, Australia, Germany, Great Britain, France, and Sweden — to approximately six thousand individuals in the Soviet Ukraine, including "officials, members of the party and government, libraries, scholarly and cultural institutions, and private individuals."

Contact operations. Prolog collaborators operating from the New York office made contact with Soviet citizens traveling in the West, debriefing them and passing information back to CIA. In fiscal year 1968 alone, Prolog collaborators brought twenty documents indicating dissent from the Soviet Ukraine to Western intelligence.

Political organization. The CIA worked to unify the fractious Ukrainian emigre community — including OUN/B and the UPA leadership networks — under a single umbrella that could be "more consistent with American foreign policy." AERODYNAMIC case officers actively directed the internal politics of the Ukrainian nationalist movement in Western Europe and the United States for decades.

The scale and duration of this operation is documented across dozens of volumes of AERODYNAMIC files in the CIA reading room. The project was approved in 1950. It was renewed repeatedly — in 1952, 1953, 1954, and beyond. It continued operating, under various configurations, through the 1960s and 1970s. For three decades, the CIA maintained an operational relationship with the organizational successors of the men who had carried out the Volhynia massacres.

Poland: The Ally That Was Never Told

The United States and Poland were allied powers during World War II. Polish forces — the fourth-largest Allied army — had fought under British command from the fall of France in 1940 through the end of the war. Polish mathematicians had broken the Enigma code. Polish pilots had fought in the Battle of Britain. The Polish Home Army had conducted one of the largest resistance operations in occupied Europe.

And 100,000 Polish civilians had been murdered by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army between 1943 and 1945.

The United States government knew this. American military and diplomatic personnel had documented the atrocities. The OSS — the CIA's wartime predecessor — had received reports on UPA operations throughout the war. The CIA's own 1951 analytical history of the UPA contained enough detail about the organization's wartime conduct to leave no doubt about what had occurred in Volhynia.

Poland was then handed to Stalin at Yalta by Roosevelt and Churchill — a betrayal that Polish historians and diplomats have documented exhaustively. Under Soviet occupation, the communist-installed government in Warsaw was forced to suppress all discussion of the Volhynia massacres, attributing them to German provocation or remaining silent entirely.

While Poland lived under Soviet occupation, while its people were forbidden from even speaking about what had happened to their countrymen in Volhynia, the CIA was running a covert operation from a New York office building, paying the man responsible for the OUN's security apparatus a salary, and using his networks to conduct intelligence operations against the Soviet state.

The Polish government in exile — the legitimate government that had never surrendered, that continued to operate from London — was never informed. Its claims on behalf of the Polish victims of Volhynia were never brought to the attention of the CIA's operational partners. The question of accountability for 100,000 murdered Poles was simply not a variable in the Cold War calculation.

The Operational Record the CIA Buried

One of the most revealing documents in the AERODYNAMIC archive is not a funding approval or an agent roster. It is a 1951 intelligence report on the UPA's active operations inside Soviet Ukraine.

The document describes the UPA's resistance districts, its command structure, its methods of attack. It notes, as a matter of operational intelligence, that "in March 1947, UPA men attacked and killed Lieutenant General Karol Świerczewski, Vice Minister of Defense of Poland."

Think about what that sentence means in context. The CIA was documenting, as useful intelligence, the UPA's assassination of a senior Polish military official — and simultaneously funding the organization that carried out the killing. The victim was a communist official, which made the killing strategically useful to American Cold War objectives. The fact that he was Polish, that his death occurred on Polish territory, that the organization responsible had recently completed a three-year campaign to exterminate the Polish civilian population of Volhynia — none of this appears to have weighed in the analysis.

The Cold War calculation was simple and ruthless: the UPA was fighting the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was the enemy. Therefore the UPA was an asset. The 100,000 Poles they had killed were not the Soviet Union. Therefore the 100,000 Poles did not factor into the equation.

The Cover-Up Operation

The CIA did not merely fund the UPA networks. It actively managed the cover-up of their wartime record.

The AERODYNAMIC documents reveal that the CIA used Prolog's propaganda infrastructure to shape the historical narrative about the Ukrainian nationalist movement reaching both Western audiences and Ukrainians inside the Soviet Union. The narrative consistently presented the UPA and OUN as pure anti-Soviet freedom fighters, emphasizing their resistance to Stalinist collectivization and Soviet terror while omitting or minimizing their collaboration with Nazi Germany and their mass murder of Polish civilians.

When American journalists and investigators began looking into the wartime records of CIA-connected Ukrainian emigres in the 1970s and 1980s, the CIA resisted disclosure. When the GAO investigated in the 1980s and found that Lebed was "Subject D" in a classified study of Nazi collaborators assisted into the United States, the CIA's response was to remove documents from the National Archives. Pages were physically extracted from files before their release under the Freedom of Information Act.

The cover-up was institutional and deliberate. The CIA had spent thirty years building a Ukrainian intelligence network on a foundation of mass murder. Letting the foundation become public would have undermined not just the operation but the broader Cold War framework that justified it.

The Historical Consequence

The CIA's three-decade funding and management of the UPA and OUN networks had a consequence that extends directly into the present day.

The Ukrainian diaspora communities in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe — built substantially by OUN and UPA veterans and their families who had fled Soviet occupation — absorbed a historical narrative shaped in part by CIA-funded propaganda. That narrative presented the UPA as national liberation heroes. It minimized or denied the Volhynia massacres. It portrayed collaboration with Nazi Germany as a pragmatic anti-Soviet necessity rather than an ideological partnership.

This narrative, reinforced by CIA-funded publications for three decades, became the dominant historical memory of the Ukrainian nationalist movement in the West. It shaped how universities taught Ukrainian history. It shaped how museums curated Ukrainian emigre experience. It shaped how politicians in Kyiv, drawing on that diaspora tradition, constructed post-Soviet Ukrainian national identity.

When Ukraine achieved independence in 1991, the OUN and UPA were not remembered in the West as the organizations that had massacred 100,000 Poles and staffed Nazi jails in occupied Poland. They were remembered, in the framework the CIA had spent thirty years constructing, as freedom fighters who had resisted both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism.

Monuments to Bandera went up. Streets were named for UPA commanders. Schools used textbooks presenting Volhynia as a mutual conflict rather than a one-sided extermination. And in May 2026, Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree naming a Special Operations Forces unit "Heroes of the UPA."

The CIA built the ideological foundation that made that decree politically possible. It did so knowingly, with full awareness of what the UPA had done to Poland, using the man whose organization had committed the massacres as its principal agent.

What the Documents Prove

Let the record be stated plainly, in terms that trace directly to CIA files available in the public reading room today.

The CIA formally approved and funded Project AERODYNAMIC beginning in 1950, providing covert support to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army — UPA — and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists — OUN/B — seven years after those organizations had massacred 100,000 Polish civilians.

The CIA recruited, imported, and installed as its principal agent Mykola Lebed — the OUN's third-in-command and security chief, a man its own files described as connected to "massacres against entire Polish villages."

The CIA used classified immigration provisions, requiring sign-off by the Attorney General and CIA Director, to bring Lebed into the United States while concealing his wartime record from immigration authorities.

The CIA funded a front organization — Prolog Research Corporation in New York — staffed by former members of the Ukrainian underground, which conducted propaganda, intelligence, and contact operations for three decades.

The CIA removed documents from the National Archives when investigators began examining its relationship with Ukrainian nationalist war criminals.

None of these facts are disputed. All of them are in the CIA's own files.

Poland deserved to know. It was never told. It was instead handed to the same Soviet empire that the CIA was using the murderers of its citizens to fight.

History does not offer many cleaner examples of an allied government's citizens being killed, their killers being recruited by another allied government, and the entire chain of events being buried in classified archives for fifty years.

The archives are now open. The documents are public. The question that remains is whether any government — American, Ukrainian, or otherwise — will acknowledge what they say.

CIA Primary Source Documents — Project AERODYNAMIC

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 1: Original Project Approval and Purpose (UHVR, UPA, OUN/B named as instruments of US Cold War strategy)https://t.co/Zj2omPp5B4

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 1: Project Renewal 1952-1953 (explicit statement of purpose, agent dispatch into Soviet Ukraine) https://t.co/Dm1129Pa2B

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 2: Operational Structure (UHVR-CIA working relationship, funding channels, agent training) https://t.co/XJhVneLnIX

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 2: Renewal Document (UPA and OUN/B named as exploitation targets)https://t.co/4G4zZhXsQg

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 3: PP Activities (propaganda operations, 93 publications, six thousand monthly bulletins mailed into Soviet Ukraine from eight countries)https://t.co/J7ifIO0Sth

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 11: Ukrainian Resistance Operations (UPA command structure, resistance districts, assassination of Polish General Świerczewski, 35,000 Soviet casualties documented)https://t.co/WUM8iFaRjW

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 35: Mykola Lebed as Principal Agent (Lebed appointed President of Prolog, AECASSOWARY/2, witting of CIA support)https://t.co/oh4IpIJaJi

Project AERODYNAMIC — Volume 38: Prolog Operations (New York office contact operations, Munich publishing, CIA funding structure)https://t.co/T0EXa3xLk9

CIA — "To Catch a Nazi": The Mykola Lebed File (CIA confirmation of massacres of "entire Polish villages," Lebed's wartime record, immigration concealment) https://t.co/KcR9ikXSqB

CIA — History, Development and Organization of the Ukrainian Resistance Movement including OUN, UPA, and UHVR (CIA's own 1951 analytical assessment) https://t.co/ZdjxsHqnsx

[Mateusz Sobierajski @tymateusz]

@Deeteem1 It was not a coincidence that you returned to Poland. Thank you!!!

[Bishop Robert Barron @BishopBarron]

In a recent interview, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, former grand chancellor of the John Paul II Institute on Marriage and Family Life, confirmed the worst suspicions that many of us had.

He admitted that the changes he made at the Institute during the Pope Francis years were designed to initiate a "very profound" reform of the idea of the natural law.

Instead of absolute moral norms grounded in a keen understanding of the basic goods, he and his colleagues were proposing a moral theory rooted in historical discernment of subjective and cultural experience--not an "armchair theology" but one operating "within history and within people's lives."

This, of course, is the language of trendy postmodernism, and it is dangerous indeed.

Allow me to illustrate the principle with one example. Is slavery wrong?

Intrinsically wrong? Wrong no matter what public opinion polls say about it, no matter what the current consensus on it might be? I imagine any decent person would say yes.

But that yes is predicated upon precisely what the tradition calls the natural law and the basic goods. There are some values so fundamental that acts repugnant to them are by their very nature wicked.

If you want a highly articulate presentation of this idea, go to St. John Paul II's Veritatis Splendor.

If we say that this is just "armchair theologizing" and that morality is a function of ever-shifting cultural and experiential data, then why couldn't slavery be justified?

One of the very smartest persons that ever lived, the philosopher Aristotle, thought it was; extremely bright and morally upright persons in our country, well into the 19th century, thought it was permissible.

Who is to say whether the consensus might shift back again? Who is to say that "lived experience" might come to justify it?

What any truly coherent moral program requires is the very thing that Archbishop Paglia and his colleagues were endeavoring to eliminate, namely, absolute moral norms.

Ridding ourselves of these in the name of freedom or pastoral sensitivity actually renders moral discourse dysfunctional, just as relativizing the basic principle of logic would render any rational conversation impossible.

The Archbishop's interview, frankly, reminded me of the discussions I had at the Synod on Synodality with some of my German colleagues. Under the rubric of the development of doctrine, they were eager to relativize or radically change the principles undergirding classical morality. If this was and is truly the game, we have ventured onto perilous seas.

Link to the article below.

[Poszukiwania IPN @PoszukiwaniaIPN]

🟥 W związku ze wzrostem zainteresowania pracami Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej na Ukrainie w trzech kolejnych postach wyjaśnimy jak przebiegają prace poszukiwawcze i ekshumacyjne.
Kiedy w mediach pojawiają się informacje o działaniach na Ukrainie, słowa „poszukiwania” i „ekshumacje” bardzo często stosowane są zamiennie. To błąd, który rodzi sporo nieporozumień. Aby dobrze rozumieć oficjalne komunikaty, trzeba wiedzieć, że mówimy o dwóch zupełnie innych etapach działań. Łączy je wspólny cel, ale są to zupełnie dwa różne procesy wynikające z ukraińskiego prawa. Dodatkowo, ta procedura wygląda inaczej w Polsce, gdzie prace poszukiwawcze łączymy z ekshumacyjnymi, a inaczej na Ukrainie, gdzie musimy występować o oddzielne zgody. Najpierw na prace poszukiwawcze dopiero później ekshumacyjne. Dodatkowo zgody wydawane są dwuinstancyjnie: przez władze administracyjne szczebla lokalnego, następnie władze rządowe.

🟠 Etap 1: Prace poszukiwawcze. Ich celem jest weryfikacja informacji o lokalizacji mogił i sprawdzenie czy spoczywają w nich szczątki poszukiwanych osób. 📷
Badamy teren po to, żeby sprawdzić, czy w danym miejscu znajdują się groby. Pracujemy niezwykle ostrożnie – zdejmujemy ziemię warstwa po warstwie, szukając śladów dawnego wkopu w nienaruszonym gruncie (tzw. calcu). Jeśli trafimy na jamę grobową, odsłaniamy jej zarys i fragment szczątków, żeby potwierdzić istnienie w tym miejscu mogiły. Wszystko fotografujemy, nanosimy na mapy współrzędne GPS, zabezpieczamy i z powrotem zasypujemy.

🟠Etap 2: Ekshumacja. Jej celem jest uważne podjęcie wcześniej odnalezionych szczątków. 📷
Na miejsce wracają specjaliści Biura Poszukiwań i Identyfikacji, którzy całkowicie otwierają mogiłę, dokładnie oczyszczają szczątki warstwa po warstwie, podejmując kolejne szkielety odnalezionych osób. Jest to proces bardzo pracochłonny, wymagający niezwykłej precyzji, szczególnie w przypadku ofiar tak brutalnego ludobójstwa. Archeolodzy i antropolodzy badają jamę do końca, a podjęte szczątki składają do tymczasowych trumien.

Dwie osobne zgody. Zgodnie z ukraińskim prawem na każdy z tych procesów wymagane jest oddzielne zezwolenie. Na podstawie dokumentacji wykonanej w pierwszym etapie strona polska składa wniosek o udzielenie zezwolenia na przeprowadzenie ekshumacji.
To właśnie te procedury i czas oczekiwania na decyzje urzędowe decydują o tempie wszystkich prac.
W kolejnym poście opowiemy w szczegółach jak wygląda etap poszukiwań.

[mynextchapter @Deeteem1]

Hitler's Payroll: The Documentary Record of Ukraine's Armed Collaboration with Nazi Germany in Occupied Poland.

There is a word that gets applied selectively in conversations about World War II. That word is collaborator. Western Europe uses it freely about Vichy France, about Norwegian Quislings, about Danish administrators who kept Nazi machinery running. When it comes to Ukrainian participation in the Nazi occupation of Poland, that word disappears. What replaces it are euphemisms — "complex history," "difficult choices," "both sides."

The documentary record does not use euphemisms. It uses payroll ledgers, operational orders, unit rosters, and SS command structures. And that record, spread across the German Federal Archives in Berlin, the U.S. National Archives at College Park, and the Holocaust documentation centers at Yad Vashem and the USHMM, tells a story that Ukraine's current government would prefer the world never read carefully.

This is that story.

The Architecture of Collaboration

On July 25, 1941, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler signed a formal directive establishing the Schutzmannschaft — the auxiliary police force that would become Nazi Germany's primary instrument of occupation policing across Eastern Europe. The order, catalogued in the German Federal Archives as BArch RW 41/4, created the legal and organizational framework for recruiting local populations into German service.

The document established a command structure in which Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Baltic auxiliary units were subordinated directly to the German Order Police (Ordnungspolizei). It was not informal collaboration. It was a formal military and police organization, with German officers in command, operating under SS authority, governed by SS regulations, and funded by the German state.

Within weeks of Himmler's order, Ukrainian auxiliary police units were operational across occupied Poland and Soviet Ukraine. The numbers were staggering. By late 1941, over 35,000 Ukrainian auxiliary police were active in the region. By 1942, as German administrators expanded the program aggressively, the Schutzmannschaft across all occupied territories reached an estimated 300,000 men. Ukrainian historian Ivan Dereiko has calculated that in Reichskommissariat Ukraine alone there were approximately 80,000 Ukrainian police auxiliaries — four times the number of German policemen in the same territory.

The ratio everywhere was roughly ten Ukrainians for every one German. The Germans were not the primary boots on the ground in occupied Poland and Ukraine. The Ukrainians were.

Who Paid Them — and With What

The payment structure of the Ukrainian auxiliary police is documented in German administrative records now held at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland under Record Group 242 — National Archives Collection of Foreign Records Seized. These are Nazi Germany's own captured administrative files, microfilmed after the war and made available to researchers.

What those records establish is that Ukrainian auxiliary police received regular wages from the German occupation administration — paid, administered, and processed through the same bureaucratic channels as any other component of the Nazi state apparatus in the east.

More revealing still is the sourcing of those funds. Schutzmannschaft units across Ukraine and occupied Poland were paid by German authorities, and the documentary record — including sources cited by military historians researching the Schutzmannschaft's role in the Holocaust — confirms that payment was frequently made with funds confiscated from the Jewish population being murdered. The men carrying out the killings were being paid with the money of their victims.

This was not an accident of accounting. It was a deliberate structure. The German occupation administration was largely self-financing in the occupied east through systematic confiscation of Jewish property, businesses, bank accounts, and personal assets. The Ukrainian auxiliary police who staffed the ghetto walls, conducted the roundups, and in many documented cases participated directly in mass shootings were compensated from the proceeds of those same operations.

The Training Pipeline

The Chylinski CIA document from 1941 noted that Ukrainian police in occupied Poland "are given instruction in special police schools opened by the Germans in various parts of the country." The German records confirm the infrastructure behind this observation.

A formal police school for Ukrainian auxiliary forces was established in Lviv by the district SS-and-Police Leader immediately after German occupation began in 1941. The school's director was Ivan Kozak. German Army records archived in the Bundesarchiv document BdO Ukraine Guidelines for training of the Schutzmannschaft, dated 9 April 1943 — a formal training curriculum issued by the Commander of Order Police in Ukraine covering political education, tactical operations, and law enforcement procedures under German authority.

Himmler himself ordered the formalization of NCO training for the Schutzmannschaft in August 1942, including eight weeks of political education. These were not ad hoc militias. They were trained, uniformed, armed, and indoctrinated auxiliary police operating under formal SS command structures.

The Nachtigall and Roland battalions — Ukrainian units formed under direct German Abwehr command in February 1941, sanctioned by Abwehr chief Wilhelm Canaris — predated even the formal Schutzmannschaft structure. These units, composed of OUN-B members, were operational from the opening days of Operation Barbarossa. The OUN had begun collaborating with the Abwehr — Nazi Germany's military intelligence service — from the first days of the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. Gestapo records confirm that in December 1939, Lebed and Bandera supporters were trained in sabotage, guerrilla warfare, and assassination techniques at a Gestapo facility in Zakopane, in occupied southern Poland.

What They Did in Occupied Poland

The operational record of the Ukrainian auxiliary police in occupied Poland is documented across multiple archives and confirmed by multiple categories of evidence — German administrative reports, SS operational records, survivor testimony, and postwar criminal proceedings.

In November 1942, members of the Ukrainische Hilfspolizei robbed and executed 32 Poles and one Jew in the village of Obórki in what had been Wołyń Voivodeship. The village was then burned. In December 1942, Ukrainian policemen led by German officers killed 360 Poles in Jezierce in the former Rivne district. In Lviv in early 1944, Ukrainian auxiliary police conducted a systematic campaign of arresting young Polish men, many of whom were later found dead with their identity documents stolen. Polish underground intelligence — the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) — documented these actions in operational reports now held in Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) archives in Warsaw.

These were not isolated incidents. German SS operational reports — the Ereignismeldungen (Event Reports) submitted by SS commanders to Berlin documenting daily operations across the occupied east — record Ukrainian auxiliary police participation in hundreds of actions against both Jewish and Polish civilian populations throughout 1941, 1942, and 1943. These reports, held at the U.S. National Archives under microfilm series NARA T175, constitute Germany's own contemporaneous record of who was doing what in the occupied territories.

The pattern Chylinski documented in Warsaw in 1941 — that Ukrainian jailers "treat the Poles even more harshly than do the Germans" — was not a local aberration. It was a systemic characteristic, documented independently by German administrators themselves. Professor Alexander Statiev of the University of Waterloo, writing from the German records, concluded that Ukrainian auxiliary police were the single largest category of non-German perpetrators of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union by national origin, with Ukrainian police units participating in the extermination of an estimated 150,000 Jews in Volhynia alone.

The SS Galicia Division: Formalizing Collaboration

By 1943, Ukrainian collaboration with Nazi Germany had been institutionalized to the point that a full SS division was raised from Ukrainian volunteers. The 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS — the SS Galicia Division — was established in April 1943 with the support of Otto Wächter, the German Governor of Galicia, and formally approved by Himmler.

The division recruited from the same population that had staffed the Ukrainian auxiliary police. Many of its volunteers were veterans of the Schutzmannschaft, the Nachtigall Battalion, and other German-commanded Ukrainian formations. In the winter and spring of 1944, elements of the SS Galicia Division participated in the destruction of Polish villages in the Galicia district, including the massacre at Huta Pieniacka where approximately 500 civilians were murdered.

In 1946, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg declared all members of all SS divisions criminal within the meaning of the Nuremberg Charter. Polish and German historical commissions in the 2000s found the SS Galicia Division guilty of war crimes.

Ukraine has never formally acknowledged this.

From Collaboration to Massacre: The Pipeline to Volhynia

The most consequential document in understanding how auxiliary police collaboration connected directly to the Volhynia massacres of 1943 is an internal OUN-B instruction dated March 20, 1943. In it, OUN leader Stepan Bandera ordered all OUN members who had joined the German auxiliary police — by that point numbering between 4,000 and 10,000 trained and armed men — to desert with their weapons and join the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).

The pipeline was explicit and deliberate. Germany had trained and armed a Ukrainian auxiliary police force. The OUN used membership in that force as a training program for its own military cadres. When the time came to redirect that force toward the ethnic cleansing of Poles in Volhynia, the order went out and the men transferred — trained, armed with German weapons, experienced in organized violence — directly into the UPA formations that would massacre 100,000 Polish civilians between 1943 and 1945.

The Volhynia massacres did not emerge from nowhere. They were carried out by men who had been trained, paid, uniformed, and armed by Nazi Germany. The skills they used to murder Polish villages were the same skills Germany had developed in them for occupation duty. The weapons they used were German-issued service weapons they had taken with them when they deserted.

The Archive Trail Nobody Follows

The primary documentary sources for this history are not hidden. They are catalogued, microfilmed, and available to any researcher with an institutional affiliation or a research visit to:

The German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv), Berlin and Freiburg, hold the core German administrative and military records of the General Government and Reichskommissariat Ukraine, including personnel records, operational orders, and SS command correspondence.

The U.S. National Archives at College Park, Maryland holds the captured German records under Record Group 242, including SS operational reports, Einsatzgruppen event reports (Ereignismeldungen, microfilm series T175), and General Government administrative files.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington holds extensive collections on Ukrainian auxiliary police specifically, cross-referenced with German administrative records and survivor testimony.

The Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) in Warsaw holds the most comprehensive Polish-language archive on UPA crimes and Ukrainian auxiliary police actions in occupied Poland, including AK intelligence reports from the occupation period.

Yad Vashem in Jerusalem holds documentation cited in CIA files as a primary source for Ukrainian nationalist war crimes, including eyewitness testimony and German operational records.

The reason this archive trail is not followed by Western journalists or policy analysts is not that the documents are inaccessible. It is that following them produces conclusions deeply inconvenient to the post-2022 political narrative around Ukraine.

What This Means in 2026

Zelensky named a Special Operations unit "Heroes of the UPA." The organizational ancestors of the UPA were trained by Nazi Germany, paid by Nazi Germany — often with Jewish victims' confiscated funds — and carried their German-issued weapons directly into the massacres of 100,000 Polish civilians when Bandera issued the order to desert and re-form as UPA.

This is not distant or abstract history. It is a documented chain of institutional continuity from the Schutzmannschaft payroll ledgers of 1941–1943 to the mass graves of Volhynia to the unmarked burial sites that Poland still cannot excavate because Ukraine controls access.

Poland has known this history for eighty years. It has waited for eighty years for acknowledgment, for access to graves, for a formal recognition that the UPA was not a liberation army but a German-trained, German-armed, German-paid instrument of ethnic cleansing that turned on its Polish neighbors the moment it received orders to do so.

The Order of the White Eagle was revoked. The medal was mailed back.

The graves are still sealed.

Primary Source Archive References

German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) Himmler directive establishing Schutzmannschaft: BArch RW 41/4 — "Schutzformationen in den neuen Ostgebieten," 31 July 1941 Training guidelines: BdO Ukraine Guidelines for Training of the Schutzmannschaft, 9 April 1943 https://t.co/kkK3mj242i

U.S. National Archives — Captured German Records Record Group 242 — National Archives Collection of Foreign Records Seized SS Ereignismeldungen (Event Reports) NARA Microfilm T175 Finding Aid: https://t.co/M9etJQp1xZ

CIA FOIA Reading Room "Poland Under Nazi Rule 1941" — T.H. Chylinski, U.S. Vice Consul, Page 25: "German-Ukrainian Relations in Poland"https://t.co/0cgMvtm9Qz

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Ukrainian Auxiliary Police Collections https://t.co/k2PioTy3r2

Polish Institute of National Remembrance https://t.co/QqHt9X2z20

European Holocaust Research Infrastructure — Documentary Record Ukrainian Police and the Holocaust: https://t.co/PjVxl2IzdM

[mynextchapter @Deeteem1]

The CIA Knew: How America Recruited the Men Who Massacred 100,000 Poles — and Buried the Evidence

There is a document sitting in the CIA's public reading room that the American government would prefer you never read carefully.

It was declassified only after a federal lawsuit forced it into the open. It was scrubbed — pages removed, sections blacked out — before release. And even in its sanitized form, it contains an admission so stark that it reframes the entire modern debate about Ukraine, the UPA, and why the West has never properly confronted what happened in Volhynia in 1943.

The document concerns a man named Mykola Lebed. And through Lebed, it concerns the CIA's deliberate decision to recruit, protect, and rehabilitate the leadership of the organization that issued the order to exterminate 100,000 Polish civilians.

This is that story.

What Happened in Volhynia

Before Lebed, before the CIA, before the Cold War calculations — there were the villages.

Between 1943 and 1945, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the military wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), conducted a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Polish civilian population of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia — territory that was then occupied Poland.

This was not warfare between combatants. It was the methodical extermination of a civilian population.

In June 1943, UPA commander in Volhynia Dmytro Klyachkivsky issued a written order for the "general physical liquidation of the entire Polish population." His secret directive stated: "We should make a large action of the liquidation of the Polish element. As the German armies withdraw, we should take advantage of this convenient moment for liquidating the entire male population in the age from 16 up to 60 years. We cannot lose this fight, and it is necessary at all costs to weaken Polish forces. Villages and settlements lying next to the massive forests should disappear from the face of the earth."

This was not improvised violence. It was policy.

On July 11, 1943 — a Sunday — UPA detachments simultaneously attacked 99 Polish villages across Volhynia at dawn. In a single day, 8,000 Poles were killed. Men, women, children. Many were not shot but hacked with axes, stabbed with pitchforks, and burned alive in their homes and churches.

By the end of July 1943, the UPA had raided 530 Polish villages and settlements, killing 17,000 people. August brought another wave: 301 settlements attacked, 8,000 more killed. In the village of Wola Ostrowiecka, 529 people were murdered — 220 of them children under the age of 14. In Ostrówki, 438 people died, including 246 children under 14.

When it was over, an estimated 100,000 Polish civilians had been killed. The Polish Parliament formally recognized these events as genocide in 2016. Ukraine has never done so.

The mass graves remain largely unexhumed. Polish families still do not know where their grandparents are buried.

Enter Mykola Lebed

Mykola Lebed was the OUN's third-in-command and the head of the SB — the Sluzhba Bezpeky, the organization's internal security force. He was one of the central figures in the Ukrainian nationalist movement during and after World War II.

His wartime record was not hidden. It was documented.

In 1934, Lebed participated in the assassination of Polish Interior Minister Bronisław Pieracki. He was tried and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He escaped when Germany invaded Poland in 1939.

During the war, Lebed ran the SB — the organization that, according to the CIA's own files, carried out "murders of dissenters from the OUN line." According to U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps memos from 1948, Lebed "killed some Ukrainian partisans who were fighting for the same cause."

In his own 1946 booklet on the history of the UPA, Lebed described the UPA's mission as being "to clear the forests and the surrounding areas of foreign elements." CIA-adjacent historian Philip Friedman, cited in the CIA's own documents, stated that this meant "not only Poles but Jews and Russian partisans as well."

The CIA's own declassified file on Lebed states it plainly: "Massacres and other acts of terror were also carried out against civilians, against Soviet prisoners of war, against entire Polish villages in the Ukraine, and against Jews fleeing from Nazi persecution."

There is no ambiguity in this language. The CIA, in its own internal documents, acknowledged that the organization Lebed led carried out massacres of Polish civilians.

The Recruitment

In 1947, two years after the war ended, the CIA recruited Mykola Lebed.

He was brought to the United States in 1949 under an assumed name, bypassing normal immigration law through a provision of the CIA Act of 1949 — a classified section allowing the agency to import 100 individuals per year "for reasons of national security regardless of their past."

His entry was so sensitive that it required sign-off at the highest levels of the U.S. government. According to the declassified GAO report and CIA files, Attorney General James P. McGranery, CIA Director General Walter Bedell Smith, and the Commissioner of Immigration all secretly agreed to admit Lebed to the United States.

His wartime record was concealed from immigration and naturalization authorities.

In 1957, Mykola Lebed became a United States citizen. He settled in Yonkers, New York. His telephone number was listed under his real name.

For decades, he ran CIA-funded Ukrainian émigré intelligence operations — the Prolog Research Corporation, a CIA front organization operating out of New York — producing propaganda and intelligence directed at Soviet Ukraine. He was, in effect, the CIA's primary Ukrainian asset throughout the Cold War.

The organization whose leadership massacred 100,000 Polish civilians was being run, with American taxpayer funding, out of a brick house in Westchester County.

The Cover-Up

The full story of Lebed's recruitment only began to surface in the 1980s, when a Village Voice investigation — later confirmed by a General Accounting Office probe — identified him as "Subject D" in a classified federal study of Nazi collaborators assisted in entering the United States.

The GAO found that despite its overall conclusion of "no evidence of any U.S. agency program to aid Nazis," Lebed was one of five cases involving individuals with "undesirable or questionable backgrounds who received some individual assistance in their U.S. immigrations."

When the CIA file on Lebed was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, investigators found pages missing — removed from the National Archives by the CIA four years after the events in question. Other sections were blacked out under FOIA exemptions citing "intelligence sources" and "national security."

Brooklyn District Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman, who reviewed the GAO findings, called the Lebed case "extremely disturbing," noting that the CIA had previously assured Congress it had never used the 100-person immigration provision to facilitate the entry of Nazi collaborators.

The CIA declined to comment.

Why the West Never Confronted the UPA

The Lebed case is not an isolated incident. It is the mechanism that explains one of the most persistent mysteries of postwar European history: why the mass murder of 100,000 Polish civilians by the UPA remained almost entirely unknown in the West for decades — and why Ukraine was never pressured to confront it.

The answer is structural. The CIA built its postwar Ukrainian intelligence apparatus on OUN and UPA networks. Acknowledging that these networks had committed genocide against Poles would have undermined the entire Cold War operation. So the knowledge was classified, the perpetrators were protected, and the historical narrative was managed.

OUN propaganda presenting its members as pure anti-Soviet freedom fighters — propaganda that began in 1943 when Germany's defeat became obvious and the OUN began rehabilitating its image — was not only tolerated by American intelligence. It was actively amplified. Lebed's CIA-funded Prolog Research Corporation pumped this narrative into Ukrainian diaspora communities in the United States for thirty years.

The result is the world we live in today. A generation of Ukrainian Americans raised on an OUN-sanitized version of history. A Ukrainian political culture in which UPA figures are national heroes. A Zelensky government that names Special Operations units "Heroes of the UPA." And a baffled Western press corps that has no framework to understand why Poland is furious.

They have no framework because the CIA spent forty years ensuring they wouldn't.

What the Documents Confirm

Let us be precise about what the declassified record establishes:

One. The CIA was aware, by its own internal documentation, that the UPA conducted massacres of Polish civilians. This is not disputed. It is in their files.

Two. The CIA recruited, protected, and brought to the United States the leadership of the organization that carried out those massacres — specifically Mykola Lebed, the OUN's third-in-command and head of its security apparatus.

Three. The CIA concealed Lebed's wartime record from immigration authorities, removed documents from the National Archives, and successfully prevented his prosecution for war crimes for decades.

Four. Using Section 8 of the CIA Act of 1949, the agency imported Lebed at the highest levels of government approval — with the Attorney General and CIA Director personally signing off.

Five. Lebed then ran CIA-funded operations producing propaganda that shaped the postwar Ukrainian diaspora's historical memory — systematically erasing the UPA's crimes against Poles from the narrative.

This is not conspiracy theory. It is the documented record of the United States government, available in the CIA's own public reading room.

2026: The Bill Comes Due

On May 26, 2026, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree naming an active Special Operations Forces unit "Heroes of the UPA."

On June 19, 2026, Polish President Karol Nawrocki revoked Zelensky's Order of the White Eagle — Poland's highest national honor.

Zelensky mailed it back.

Western media called it a "diplomatic spat." A disagreement between allies. A distraction benefiting Moscow.

It is none of those things.

It is the final installment of a bill that has been accumulating since 1943. A bill that the CIA helped defer for eighty years by recruiting the killers, burying the evidence, and funding the propaganda that told the world there was nothing to see.

Poland has been asking for eighty years. For recognition. For excavation of the graves. For an acknowledgment that 100,000 of its civilians were systematically murdered by the organization now honored on the shoulder patches of Ukrainian Special Forces.

The CIA knew. The U.S. government knew. They made a choice.

Poland is still waiting for someone to un-make it.

Primary Source Documents

CIA Document: "To Catch a Nazi" — The Mykola Lebed File Declassified in Part, Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/17 CIARDP9000965R000201220002-6
https://t.co/KcR9ikXSqB

CIA Document: The History, Development, and Organization of the Ukrainian Resistance Movement, Including the OUN, the UPA, and the UHVR Approved For Release 2002/01/04 CIA RDP8300415R010100150006-6 https://t.co/ZdjxsHqnsx

CIA Document: AERODYNAMIC Operations File — Ukrainian Resistance
https://t.co/WUM8iFaRjW

CIA Document: Mykola Lebed Personal File — Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act
https://t.co/gxmgdfLFnw

[Mateusz Sobierajski @tymateusz]

@kiraincongress He he

[Вы поняли, да? @Hugo_StiglitzUA]

Эта награда - Орден Моего друга 🏅. Я вручаю её каждому гражданину Польши 🇵🇱 от Белостока до Щецина и хочу, чтобы каждый поляк это знал!

Эта награда не может быть отозвана ни президентом Украины, ни президентом Польши. Она навсегда останется в сердце.

Обладатель этой награды всегда найдет помощь, понимание и протянутую руку от меня и моей семьи в любом уголке Мира.

Я хочу, чтоб каждый поляк это знал: у вас есть друг украинец. Ваш Украинский друг счастлив, что вы есть и хочет оставаться другом Вам, вашим детям и внукам.

Я не могу изменить прошлое, но если бы я мог выбрать будущее, я выбрал бы тот сценарий, в котором украинец и поляк соседи, друзья и братья

Dziękuję, że tam byłeś!
Dziękuję za Polskę!

🇵🇱 🫂 🇺🇦

[Alex Frost @alexmfrost]

Co Polska proponowała Ukrainie by rozwiązać kryzys:
1) Reorganizacja jed. woj. by problem sam się rozwiązał
2) Powołanie komisji ds. trudnych PL-UA
3) Telefon Zelenskiego do Nawrockiego, w którym ogłoszono by odblokowano 15 miejsc ekshumacyjnych
Przez 2 tygodnie nie było reakcji.

[Historia.org.pl 🇵🇱 @historia_org_pl]

🇵🇱🇺🇦 NASZ KOMENTARZ

Najbardziej niezrozumiałe w decyzji Zełenskiego nie jest nawet to, że uderza ona w polską pamięć historyczną. Najbardziej niezrozumiałe jest to, że jest ona politycznie przeciwskuteczna.

Kijów musiał wiedzieć, że odwołanie do „Bohaterów UPA” nie jest dla Polski żadnym detalem, tylko jednym z najboleśniejszych tematów XX wieku. To nie jest spór o interpretację, lecz pamięć o ludobójstwie dokonanym na polskiej ludności cywilnej.

Dlaczego więc Ukraina to robi?

Moim zdaniem stoją za tym trzy rzeczy. Po pierwsze, ukraińska polityka pamięci została w dużej mierze zbudowana wokół antyrosyjskiego oporu. W tej opowieści UPA występuje przede wszystkim jako formacja walcząca z Moskwą, a jej zbrodnie na Polakach są wypychane na margines albo relatywizowane.

Po drugie, działa presja wewnętrzna - środowisk narodowych, części wojskowych i opinii publicznej, dla których takie symbole są elementem tożsamości wojennej. Zełenski najwyraźniej uznał, że w czasie wojny bardziej opłaca się wzmacniać ten przekaz wewnątrz Ukrainy niż liczyć się z reakcją Polski.

Po trzecie, mogło zadziałać błędne założenie, że Warszawa i tak się ugnie. Że Polska, ze względu na wojnę, bezpieczeństwo, logistykę i wsparcie dla Ukrainy, przełknie każdą symboliczną decyzję Kijowa.

Po czwarte, dochodzi do tego jeszcze błędna recepcja polskiego stanowiska po stronie części ukraińskiej opinii publicznej i elit. Tam sprzeciw wobec kultu UPA bywa odczytywany nie jako obrona pamięci ofiar, lecz jako polska wyższość, paternalizm albo próba narzucania Ukrainie własnej narracji historycznej.

To bardzo niebezpieczne nieporozumienie. Bo jeśli polskie upominanie się o Wołyń zostaje potraktowane jako „resztki imperialnego myślenia” albo „stare resentymenty”, to znika z pola widzenia sedno sprawy: zamordowani cywile, spalone wsie, kobiety, dzieci i starcy.
Psychologicznie może więc działać tu także potrzeba udowodnienia Polsce, że Ukraina sama wybiera swoich bohaterów i nie będzie się oglądać na polską wrażliwość. Tyle że w tym przypadku nie jest to gest suwerenności, tylko polityka pamięci prowadzona kosztem prawdy o ofiarach.

Dodatkowo Ukraina ma napięte relacje z Węgrami i Słowacją, wrogą Białoruś za plecami i prowadzi wojnę z Rosją. Dokładanie do tego sporu z Polską - jednym z najważniejszych sąsiadów, zapleczem pomocy i krajem, który przez lata poniósł ogromny koszt solidarności - jest strategicznie niezrozumiałe.

Co więcej, efekt jest odwrotny od zamierzonego. Zamiast wzmacniać Ukrainę, decyzja sprawiła, że światowe media znów piszą o UPA, Wołyniu i mordach na Polakach. Czyli dokładnie o tym, co Kijów najchętniej przykrywałby narracją o antyrosyjskim oporze.

Można rozumieć, że Ukraina potrzebuje własnych symboli walki z Rosją. Ale nie można oczekiwać, że Polska uzna za bohaterów ludzi związanych z formacją odpowiedzialną za ludobójstwo Polaków.

To nie jest kwestia „wrażliwości historycznej”. To granica pamięci, której żadne państwo poważnie traktujące własnych obywateli nie powinno przekraczać.

Największy błąd Kijowa polega na tym, że pomylił polskie wsparcie z polską amnezją. Polska może pomagać Ukrainie przeciw Rosji, ale nie ma obowiązku milczeć wtedy, gdy ukraińska polityka pamięci depcze pamięć polskich ofiar.

Solidarność nie oznacza zgody na historyczne upokorzenie.

[Mario @PawlowskiMario]

The Volhynia massacre is one of the most difficult subjects I’ve ever tried to understand🇵🇱🇺🇦

The more I read, the less interested I become in simple answers.

Yes, Ukrainians had real historical grievances against the Polish state.

Yes, the mass murder of Polish civilians was a horrific crime.

Yes, Polish retaliatory killings of Ukrainian civilians were also wrong.

The problem begins when each nation remembers only its own suffering and forgets the suffering it caused the other. That’s exactly how history becomes a prison instead of a lesson.

Today, Poland and Ukraine have a choice. They can spend the next hundred years proving whose grandparents suffered more.

Or they can tell the truth about all of it, honor every innocent victim, condemn every crime, and refuse to let the dead decide the future of the living.

History should unite us in wisdom. Not trap us in endless revenge.

[Myroslav Oleshko @oleshkomyroslav]

„Zełenski podczas narady w swoim gabinecie powiedział: «Pieprzyć Polskę i Polaków» — twierdzi były deputowany Rady Najwyższej Ukrainy Ihor Mosijczuk, który stanął w obronie Polski i wystąpił przeciwko Zełenskiemu.”

„…Nazwa jednostki, stopień, nazwa bohatera UPA — to wszystko jest formalnością. Dlaczego? Spójrzcie, po pierwsze. Tak naprawdę główny powód jest inny.

Zełenski i jego oszuści oraz złodzieje z sektora rolnego rok temu zrujnowali polski rynek zbożowy, powodując ogromne, ogromne straty dla polskich rolników. Co się stało? Istniało porozumienie, zgodnie z którym Ukraina miała transportować swoje zboże do polskich portów — Gdańska i Gdyni — a stamtąd, w ramach programu ONZ oraz kontraktów zawartych przez ukraiński biznes, miało ono trafiać do innych, trzecich krajów, a nie do Polski. Nasi ukraińscy rolni oszuści i złodzieje uznali jednak, że taki transport jest zbyt kosztowny, i przy pomocy takich samych polskich oszustów i złodziei zaczęli sprzedawać to zboże na polskim rynku. W rezultacie ceny gwałtownie spadły, a najbardziej ucierpieli polscy rolnicy.

Próby przemówienia Zełenskiemu do rozsądku nie przyniosły żadnego skutku. Jego były minister rolnictwa Solski, który obecnie jest objęty postępowaniem, gdzieś się ukrywa. Sam był związany z handlarzami zbożem. To oni faktycznie przepchnęli i wywalczyli to rozwiązanie. Chodziło o ogromne pieniądze. I właśnie wtedy pojawiło się pierwsze poważne pęknięcie w relacjach między Zełenskim a Polską. Dlaczego? Ponieważ polski rolnik, który ucierpiał przez działania tych oszustów i złodziei Zełenskiego, stanowi podstawę prawicowo-konserwatywnego elektoratu PiS — partii, którą, choć formalnie jest bezpartyjny, reprezentuje prezydent Nawrocki.

I dalej. Aby przypodobać się Niemcom, na ich prośbę Zełenski otwarcie poparł podczas wyborów w Polsce Donalda Tuska i Platformę Obywatelską, bezpośrednio ingerując w polski proces wyborczy. Tego mu nie zapomniano. Polscy konserwatyści mu tego nie zapomnieli. Temat UPA, Bandery, Melnyka oraz nadania jednostce wojskowej imienia bohatera UPA został wykorzystany przez Nawrockiego jako kwestia ciesząca się szerokim poparciem w polskim społeczeństwie — podobnie jak temat zbrodni wołyńskiej i podobnych wydarzeń. Nawrocki wykorzystał to po to, aby jego decyzja o odebraniu Zełenskiemu Orderu Orła Białego nie została zablokowana przez premiera Donalda Tuska. Nie może przecież wyjść i powiedzieć: „Nawrocki powiedział wtedy: «A więc popierasz gloryfikację tego wszystkiego»”. Rozumiecie? Tak właśnie faktycznie do tego doszło.

Pogorszenie relacji polsko-ukraińskich absolutnie nie leży w interesie narodowym Ukrainy. Absolutnie. Utrata dobrych relacji z jakimkolwiek sąsiadem Ukrainy, zwłaszcza w czasie wojny na pełną skalę, jest w istocie działaniem przeciwko narodowym interesom Ukrainy. A przecież to tylko jeden z wielu przykładów. Choćby Starlink — to Polska za niego płaci.

Przejdźmy do drugiego punktu. Wiem to na pewno. Ukraińscy historycy i przedstawiciele ukraińskiej nauki historycznej po pierwszych wypowiedziach Nawrockiego rozmawiali z Zełenskim i zaproponowali rozwiązanie tego problemu poprzez przekazanie dialogu o pamięci historycznej i przeszłości historykom — zarówno ukraińskim, jak i polskim. Zełenski stanowczo odmówił. U ludzi, którzy z nim rozmawiali, a później rozmawiali ze mną, powstało wrażenie, że ma do tego osobisty stosunek. Że to dla niego coś osobistego. Ponieważ gdy zaproponowano mu rozwiązanie sporu poprzez naukowy dialog historyczny, odpowiedział: „Niech spier… i Polska, i Polacy”...

[Mateusz Sobierajski @tymateusz]

@DevMika_UA @Awendanew Let us then check the facts by exhumation and proper burial of our people.