page_title: Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia
section_title: Classification of genocide
hierarchical_section_title: Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia / Classification of genocide
caption_attribution_description: Polski: Aleja Ofiar OUN-UPA w Legnicy
context_page_description: The massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, were carried out in German-occupied Poland by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA, with the active and frequent support of the local Ukrainian population against the Polish minority in Volhynia, Eastern Galicia, parts of Polesia and Lublin region from 1943 to 1945. The peak of the massacres took place in July and August 1943. Most of the victims were women and children. UPA's methods were particularly brutal, with many of the victims being tortured and mutilated, and resulted in 40,000–60,000 Polish deaths in Volhynia and 30,000–40,000 in Eastern Galicia, with the total in other regions about 100,000.
  The killings were directly linked with the policies of Stepan Bandera's faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its military arm, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, whose goal as specified at the Second Conference of the OUN-B on 17–23 February 1943 was to purge all non-Ukrainians from the future Ukrainian state. Not limiting their activities to the purging of Polish civilians, the UPA also wanted to erase all traces of the Polish presence in areas.
context_section_description: The question of whether this event should be characterized as 'genocide' or 'ethnic cleansing' is accepted by Polish historians but debated by contemporary Ukrainian academics. The historian Per Anders Rudling states that the goal of the OUN-UPA was not the exterminatation of Poles but ethnic cleansing of the region to attain an ethnically homogeneous state. The goal was thus to prevent a repeat of 1918–20, when Poland crushed Ukrainian independence as the Polish Home Army was attempting to restore the Polish Republic in its pre-1939 borders. According to Ivan Katchanovski, the mass killings of Poles in Volhynia by the UPA cannot be classified as a genocide because there is no evidence that the UPA intended to annihilate entire or significant parts of the Polish nation, the UPA action was mostly limited to a relatively small area and the number of Poles killed was quite a small fraction of the prewar Polish population in both the territories in which the UPA operated and of the entire Polish population in Poland and Ukraine.
  The Institute of National Remembrance investigated the crimes committed by the UPA against the Poles in Volhynia, Galicia and prewar Lublin Voivodeship and collected over 10,000 pages of documents and protocols. The massacres were described by the commission's prosecutor, Piotr Zając, as bearing the characteristics of a genocide: "there is no doubt that the crimes committed against the people of Polish nationality have the character of genocide". Also, the Institute of National Remembrance in a published paper stated:
  The Volhynian massacres have all the traits of genocide listed in the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which defines genocide as an act "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such."
  On 15 July 2009, the Sejm of the Republic of Poland unanimously adopted a resolution regarding "the tragic fate of Poles in Eastern Borderlands". The text of the resolution states that July 2009 marks the 66th anniversary "of the beginning of anti-Polish actions by the Organization of Ukrainian nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army on Polish Eastern territories – mass murders characterised by ethnic cleansing with marks of genocide". On 22 July 2016, the Sejm passed a resolution declaring 11 July a National Day of Remembrance to honor the Polish victims murdered in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia by Ukrainian nationalists and formally called the massacres a genocide.
caption: Memorial OUN-UPA Genocide Victims' Avenue located in the city of Legnica, Poland
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