ДІЯЛЬНІСТЬ І ТАКТИКА УПА НА ЗАКЕРЗОННІ

Abstract

The article addresses several issues related to the circumstances, conditions, and features of the UPA's activities in Zakerzonia in World War II and the post-war period. The activity and tactics of the UPA, its role in protecting the Ukrainian people on this territory from the armed formations of the Polish communist regime and the NKVD troops were investigated. The main tasks set before the UPA and OUN soldiers in Zakerzonia are shown. The reasons for the implementation of the Operation Vistula by the Polish communist regime and how it affected the further fate of the Ukrainian local people and the subsequent UPA activities are covered. The facts of fights between the UPA soldiers and the Polish communist militias (mainly the police and the armed forces of the newly created Polish state) and their causes were investigated. The role of the NKVD troops on this territory in the fight against the liberation of the Ukrainian national movement and the eviction of the Ukrainian people from this territory is analyzed. The reasons for the cessation of the UPA struggle at Zakerzonia are shown.It is established that the UPA, considering the territory of the Lemkivshchyna, Nadsiannia, Chełm Land and Podlachia regions, which remained on the borders of the Polish state, as the original Ukrainian ethnic territory, acted in defence of the rights and lives of the local autochthonous Ukrainian people. First of all, its detachments began to destroy the displacement commissions, the Polish military, as well as to burn villages from which the Ukrainians were expelled and to which the Poles settled. The OUN and the UPA essentially not just defended Ukrainian people but also pursued specifically targeted propaganda policy.The complete eviction of the Ukrainian people has deprived the UPA's armed struggle in these territories of its primary objective. Therefore, the UPA command decides to cease further armed struggle in Zakerzon. Some departments were tasked with going in raids to the west, while others had to move to the UkrSSR territory.