UPA
The UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) was a Ukrainian paramilitary and partisan formation established in 1942 in the territory of Nazi-occupied Ukraine as the armed wing of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). It operated mainly in western Ukraine and fought successively against the German occupation, the Soviet forces and, after the Second World War, continued armed resistance against Soviet rule into the mid-1950s. The UPA's history remains deeply contested in Ukrainian, Polish, Russian and broader European memory, in part because its anti-Soviet struggle was accompanied by the ethnic cleansing of Polish civilians in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943–1945, a subject that continues to shape relations between Ukraine and Poland today.
-
Polish MEP Grzegorz Braun destroys UPA monument near Polish-Ukrainian border; police open hate-crime probe
Grzegorz Braun, a Polish member of the European Parliament and leader of the far-right Confederation of the Polish Crown, together with a party colleague, damaged a granite obelisk honoring UPA soldiers in a village near the Polish-Ukrainian border and published video of the act on X. Polish police opened an investigation on September 6 that includes possible charges of desecration of a monument and burial site, property damage, and a hate crime on national grounds. Braun said the obelisk should be dismantled because, in his view, it "insults the memory of victims of the Ukrainian genocide of Poles."