Volhynia was not a major area of activity for either Polish or Soviet partisans. The partisan forces in Volhynia were small. The Poles had few weapons, and the Russians were mainly focused on other areas. The Soviet partisan detachments were waging a desperate war against the Germans, and the appearance of a new front was an unexpected problem for them. The Poles created self-defense detachments called plyatsuvki, as well as mobile partisan groups to aid them. Groups of ethnic Poles also operated in Volhynia as part of the Soviet partisan movement. However, all these forces suffered from a severe shortage of weapons and ammunition and were often simply powerless to stop the killers. The Soviet partisans focused mainly on sabotage against German military installations and did not have enough forces or equipment to protect villages. To make matters worse, there was a distinct lack of trust between the Soviet and Polish partisans.

Meanwhile, events were rapidly developing. The incident that kicked off what would later be called the Volyn massacre is considered to be a raid on the village of Paroslya on February 9, 1943. The militants did not waste bullets: Poles were hacked to pieces with axes. A number of villages were dealt with in a similar fashion. In March, the village of Lipniki was destroyed. Among the survivors was a one-and-a-half-year-old baby, who had been accidentally overlooked. The infant, whose grandfather had been stabbed with a bayonet, was found the next morning by chance, lying in the snow among the dead and dying. He would grow up to become the first Polish cosmonaut, Miroslav Germashevsky.

The blood was intoxicating, and the carnage became more and more ferocious. Polish women were raped, and many Poles were brutally tortured before being killed. The murders were mainly carried out using farming equipment or other improvised means. As is often the case, political violence begot criminal violence. The most unscrupulous of peasants tried to appropriate other people’s land by nefarious means, often employing the simplest method – killing the owners. In addition, the nationalists bound ordinary peasants together by blood. They drove prisoners into a pile and forced the Ukrainian peasants to kill them.

The Nazis used the massacre with truly diabolical ingenuity. Police detachments made up of Polish collaborators who had already killed Ukrainians were brought into Volhynia, so many peasants took the Germans’ atrocities to be revenge by the Poles.

The ethnic cleansing of Volhynia went on for several months, gradually shifting from east to west. The experience the killers had acquired in punitive operations with the Nazi police was not wasted: the massacre was carried out methodically, with the discipline of an army operation. For example, it was characteristic of the Nazis to gather villagers in one building and then burn them alive, and about forty Poles were killed in Guchin in the same manner. A Ukrainian who had hidden a Polish woman was executed along with the Poles. Another common technique was to appear friendly to the Poles at first, so they would not immediately flee, and later gather the victims together in one place under some plausible pretext.

Victims were thoroughly robbed, houses were burned. The murderers tried not only to execute the people but destroy their cultural values as well. After about a hundred Poles had been shot en masse in Poritska, nationalists blew up an 18th-century church with the help of an artillery shell and then set fire to what was left of the building. The commanders did not hesitate to personally participate in the killings. For example, Pyotr Oleinik, aka ‘Aeneas’, who led the OUN forces near Rivne, executed captured Poles himself.

Gender and age were no protection – 438 people were killed in the village of Ostrovki, of whom 246 were children under the age of 14. “The entire Polish population, including infants, was destroyed (cut and chopped up). I personally shot 5 Poles there who were fleeing into the forest,” a captured militant later told Soviet investigators during interrogation about his participation in an attack on another village.

As a rule, the main murder weapons were peasant tools – axes, pitchforks, knives, and hammers. In some cases, places were swept a second time to find people who had managed to hide during the first attack and returned to the ashes. The Poles’ attempts to organize negotiations failed. The Home Army sent Sigmund Rummel, an officer and poet who spoke Ukrainian well, to parlay with the leaders of the OUN. He, as well as the officer and guide accompanying him, were seized and tortured to death.

The peak of the atrocities fell on July 11, 1943, when nationalists ravaged up to a hundred Polish villages at once – villages were cordoned off, after which designated groups entered and carried out reprisals

The killings continued on a smaller scale until the winter of 1944. According to various estimates, from 40,000 to 60,000 Poles were killed in total. Up to 7,000 people escaped by joining Soviet partisan detachments or taking refuge in cities where OUN detachments were not active. In addition to Poles, almost a thousand ‘disloyal’ Ukrainians, more than a thousand Jews, and about 135 Russians were killed. In addition, the forces of the Polish Home Army, as well as pro-German collaborators, killed more than 2,000 Ukrainians.

In the 1944 campaign, the Wehrmacht was defeated, and Volhynia was liberated by the Red Army. For the Soviet government, the OUN and the ‘Ukrainian Insurgent Army’ (UPA), which had been formed during the Volyn massacre, became a major headache, as the numerous armed groups posed a serious problem. By 1945, the main forces of the nationalists had been defeated. The Volyn massacre was certainly a crime from the standpoint of the Soviet authorities. Consequently, Yuri Stelmaschuk, who had been one of the key OUN commanders during the massacre in Volhynia, was arrested in January of 1945 and brought before a tribunal.

At the trial, Stelmaschuk tried to dodge the charges, claiming that he had tried to sabotage Klyachkovsky’s order to massacre the Poles. Nevertheless, he was found guilty of murdering 5,000 Poles, sentenced to death, and shot. Pyotr Oleinik, the commander of the OUN forces near Rivne, was shot during a special NKVD operation in February of 1946. Finally, Dmitry Klyachkovsky, the leader and organizer of the massacre, was eliminated thanks to the capture of Stelmaschuk, who revealed his hiding place under interrogation. A large NKVD detachment surrounded and defeated Klim Savura’s detachment, and the executioner himself was mortally wounded during the pursuit.

For modern Ukraine, the Volyn massacre is an inconvenient story. Ukrainian nationalists of the Second World War are considered national heroes, and the fact that these people stained themselves with horrific crimes creates a serious problem – especially since the victims were Poles, and modern Poland is seen as an ally and even a patron of Ukraine. However, this hero worship is unlikely to change anytime soon. Ukraine’s entire public agenda is heavily influenced by nationalists who revere the OUN, so the murderers are destined to remain on a pedestal for now.

West lying about WWII –
Comparisons between the USSR and Hitler’s Nazis are an effort to rewrite history, according to a top envoy

The legacy of WWII, which saw the Soviet Red Army drive out Nazi troops from Eastern Europe before shattering the Third Reich, risks being hijacked by those looking to exonerate Hitler’s crimes or erase the contribution of the USSR, Moscow’s ambassador to the US has claimed.

Writing in an op-ed published Thursday in conservative American newspaper The Washington Times, Anatoly Antonov argued that former Eastern Bloc countries tolerate the celebration of Nazism and refuse to recognize the USSR’s key role in defeating the Axis powers during the Second World War.

“We are currently witnessing a cynical policy of distorting the historical truth,” the diplomat wrote. “The memorials to victors of fascism are demolished in Ukraine, the Baltic States and Poland. There is a self-evident desire to erase the memory of the deed of the Soviet soldier-liberator, whom they try to put on equal footing with Hitler’s executioners.”

He claimed that “some Eastern European countries regularly host marches to honor the punitive SS divisions,” celebrating the Nazi paramilitary organization responsible for the murders of millions of Jews, Roma, and other victims during the Holocaust.

Last April, around 100 far-right nationalists marched in the center of Kiev to celebrate the 77th anniversary of the SS Galicia division. The German embassy in Ukraine spoke out publicly to condemn the demonstrations.

Antonov went on to say that the problem is not limited to former Eastern Bloc countries, adding, “these disturbing trends affect the United States as well. Belittling the decisive USSR contribution to smashing Nazism and excluding our country from the victors in World War II have become a common practice. There are over 800 active extremist groups in the country, advocating the theory of white supremacy. Their ‘legitimacy’ is justified by the first amendment to the US Constitution that guarantees freedom of speech.”

He noted, however, that many Americans continue to celebrate the alliance between the US, the USSR, and other nations that defeated Germany and its allies in World War II.

Thursday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day and also the 78th anniversary of the lifting of the Siege of Leningrad. The blockade lasted from 1941-1944 and killed several million soldiers and civilians, more than the entire WWII deaths of the US and UK combined.

Back in January 21st 2022, Russia’s Lavrov blasted CNN
Veteran official Sergey Lavrov had some choice words for an American reporter

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has hit out at a series of questions from American news network CNN, which probed Moscow about its decision to raise concerns about NATO while reportedly bulking up its presence on the Ukrainian border.

Speaking on Friday in Geneva following discussions with his American counterpart Antony Blinken, Russia’s top diplomat poured scorn on a journalist’s assertion that Moscow could stage an incursion into Ukraine – a prospect that has been raised repeatedly by Western leaders and media outlets in recent months.

“You claim that [Russia] is planning to attack Ukraine, even though we have already explained many times that this is not the case,” he insisted. “But when you assert that this will happen, you immediately ask ‘Why now? When aren’t we going to attack?’”

In response to a question about the need to make deployments to the border when the security stance of Washington and NATO has remained fairly unchanged in the past few years, Lavrov said that the US-led military bloc was designed against the world’s largest country.

“It was set up against the Soviet Union and for some reason it still works against Russia,” he said, adding that Moscow had previously warned about the inclusion of the Baltic states in the alliance.

He ended his remarks to the journalist with a request for CNN to be more “accurate with [your] facts.”

Lavrov’s remarks come after the two diplomats held talks in the Swiss city of Geneva, the latest in a series of diplomatic meetings after Moscow handed over two draft treaties last month. One document was addressed to Washington and the other to NATO, which Russia says are designed to reduce the risk of conflict on the European continent.

Among the requests is a demand for the military bloc to provide written guarantees that it will not expand further toward Russia’s borders, effectively blocking Ukraine from joining its ranks. Moscow also demanded that NATO should refrain from military activity on the territory of the former Warsaw Pact states that joined after 1997, after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Last month, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov said the expansion of NATO closer to Russia’s borders is a question of “life or death” as officials seek to obtain guarantees ruling out the organization widening eastwards.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has previously insisted that the last Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, was given assurances by Western leaders that NATO would not expand into the space left after the collapse of the USSR. A tranche of documents was declassified in 2017, and was subsequently widely interpreted as showing that American, British, and German officials verbally assured the Kremlin in the 1990s that NATO would not push into Eastern European countries, before then admitting members such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.

Lavrov & Blinken meet for crunch Russia-US talks in Geneva
Washington’s top diplomat has played down the chances of making a breakthrough

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his American counterpart, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, are sitting down to discuss Moscow’s security proposals and determine whether a deal can be done to de-escalate tensions with NATO.

The two top diplomats are holding talks in the Swiss city of Geneva, with the pair expected to publicly announce the results of their discussions later on the same day. The head-to-head is the latest in a series of diplomatic meetings held after Russia unveiled two draft treaties, one addressed to Washington and the other to NATO, that it says would reduce the risk of conflict on the European continent.

Among the proposals is a demand that the US-led military bloc issue written guarantees that it will not expand further toward Russia’s borders, effectively blocking Ukraine from future membership. In addition, Moscow insists that NATO should refrain from military activity on the territory of the former Warsaw Pact states that joined after 1997, after the fall of the Soviet Union.

"Nothing is What it seems, so many Lies and Deceptions are in Progress"
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