Correction: the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, Zelenskyy and Poland

I must apologise to readers for the fact that in yesterday’s post,

I was evidently and unforgivably wrong in the way in which I described the Second World War Ukrainian forces that have recently been the subject of a bitter row between Poland’s President Karol Nawrocki (supported by Prime Minister Donald Tusk) and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

I summarised the dispute as being about “a Ukrainian military unit whose forerunner during the Second World War was involved in a massacre of Poles by Soviet forces of which the Ukrainians formed part”. This was wrong. I paid too little attention to the complex historical reality in which the terrible events in question arose.

The dispute arose when Zelenskyy honoured a man called Andriy Melnyk as a “Ukrainian hero”, after Melnyk’s remains were returned from Luxembourg for reburial in Kyiv on May 24. This is how the event was covered by the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/world/europe/ukraine-melnyk-nationalist-collaborator.html.

As that piece explains, Melnyk led one of two factions of a group called the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (ONU). Neither faction of the ONU ever “formed part” of Soviet forces. Rather the ONU formed part of the fight for Ukrainian sovereignty, in a period in which Ukraine itself formed part of what the historian Timothy Snyder termed the “Bloodlands” between Hitler and Stalin in his 2010 book of that name.

The western part of what is now again Ukraine — Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, including the now well-known city of Lviv — had been seized by Poland in 1918. As this essay in Engelsberg Ideas by the historian and journalist Owen Matthews explains (https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/the-ghosts-of-ukraines-past/), this and the ensuing bloody history of the 1930s and 1940s meant that the ONU treated Poles, the Soviet Union and ultimately Nazi Germany as enemies to be fought.

The ONU undoubtedly committed massacres of Poles during this period, which is why Melnyk and the group of which he formed part are considered in Warsaw to have been genocidal criminals rather than the pro-independence heroes they were being portrayed as by Zelenskyy at last month’s ceremony. One of the readers who kindly wrote to point out my misunderstanding recommended this Wikipedia entry as being a “reasonably fair summary”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacres_of_Poles_in_Volhynia_and_Eastern_Galicia

Melnyk’s personal role in all this is itself disputed by historians since although he did advocate collaboration with Nazi Germany he was put under house arrest by the Germans in Berlin in 1941 and in 1944 was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. After the war he went into exile and died in Luxembourg in 1964. But that does not detract from his undoubted leadership role in the ONU, which is why the May ceremony was considered incendiary by Poland.

My renewed apologies

BE