Council vote in Lviv

On Tuesday, 20 October 2026, the Lviv Regional Council (Lwowska Rada Obwodowa) adopted a resolution at its plenary session that makes 2027 a year dedicated to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), its commander Roman Shukhevych, and Oleh Olzhych, a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) described as a poet. The decision was published on the council's official website. The initiative was first raised in the council's culture committee on 6 July 2026, and councillors formally adopted the resolutions in October. Supporters argued that 2027 marks the 120th anniversary of the birth of Shukhevych and Olzhych and the 85th anniversary of the UPA's founding. At the session, committee chair Swiatosław Szeremeta argued that the men are part of the nation's history and deserve to be remembered respectfully.

Warsaw's response

The Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) reacted within hours, presenting the resolution as another stage in building a state cult of criminals and as a direct slap in the face to victims' families. The institute's statement reads, in part:

“Commemorating this war criminal must be seen as a blow aimed at the memory of the victims of the genocide carried out on his orders.”

Deputy Prime Minister and defence minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz wrote on X that the decision is unacceptable and urged Kyiv to disown it.

“Such a decision does not build mutual trust between nations, but strengthens divisions. It is necessary for the Ukrainian authorities to distance themselves from this position.”

PiS MP Andrzej Śliwka said the Polish government's reaction should be unambiguous and firm, including toward the people who made the decision. He tied the issue to the policy of the Tusk government and PSL toward Ukraine, and called for swift progress on bills from PiS and President Karol Nawrocki that would criminalize promoting banderism. Rafał Komarewicz, an MP for the Centrum club, called the decision a scandal on RMF FM.

“We cannot allow our society and our state to be slapped in the face by Ukrainians.”

Komarewicz said Poland should keep supporting Ukraine in its fight while being firmer about its own interests, and that Polish diplomacy should react sharply if it had prior information about the plan.

Who Shukhevych was, according to the IPN

The IPN describes Shukhevych as a figure who from the late 1920s pursued an ideology of building an ethnically uniform Ukraine. In 1941 he became deputy to the German commander of the Nachtigall battalion, later reorganized as Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201, which pacified villages in Belarus. From 1943 he led the UPA, which the institute calls the architect of the genocide in Volhynia. The IPN also recalled his order to subordinate commanders to burn purely Polish villages and, in mixed ones, to destroy only the Polish population. The institute accuses him of deliberately building a lie that denies the scale of the genocide, and he was killed in 1950 in a manhunt carried out by the NKWD.

The historical dispute and Kyiv's position

Polish historians say UPA units carried out coordinated attacks on about 150 settlements inhabited by Poles in Volhynia in July 1943, the culmination of what Poland calls the Volhynia genocide. Poland recognizes these crimes against Poles as genocide, and ethnic cleansing claimed about 120,000 victims of Polish origin. Many Ukrainian historians and politicians interpret the violence as part of a wider Polish-Ukrainian conflict in which both sides bore responsibility. In Ukrainian memory, the OUN and UPA are often seen as symbols of the struggle for independence and of post-war resistance to the Soviet Union. A Ukrainian document on the National Pantheon allows commemorating figures linked to these organizations. In late May 2026, a decision by President Volodymyr Zelensky named a military unit after the 'heroes of the UPA', which deepened tensions between Kyiv and Warsaw.