Portal:Genocide/Selected article/17

Monument in memory of the Polish victims of Janowa Dolina, Volyn (Wołyń)

The massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia were part of an ethnic cleansing operation carried out in Nazi German-occupied Poland by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in the area of Volhynia, Polesia, Lublin region and Eastern Galicia beginning in 1943 and lasting up to 1945. The peak of the genocide took place in July and August 1943. Most of the victims were women and children. UPA's methods were particularly brutal, and resulted in 40,000–60,000 polish deaths in Volhynia and 30,000–40,000 in Eastern Galicia, with the other regions for the total about 100,000. The killings were directly linked with the policies of the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) 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 (or March 1943 according to other sources) was to purge all non-Ukrainians from the future Ukrainian state. Not limiting their activities to the purging of Polish civilians, UPA also wanted to erase all traces of the Polish presence in the area. The violence was endorsed by a significant number of the Ukrainian Orthodox clergy who supported UPA's nationalist cause. The massacres led to a civil conflict between Polish and Ukrainian forces in the German-occupied territories, with the Polish Home Army in Volhynia responding to the Ukrainian attacks.

In 2008, the massacres committed by the Ukrainian nationalists against ethnic Poles in Volhynia and Galicia were described by Poland's Institute of National Remembrance as bearing the distinct characteristics of a genocide, and on 22 July 2016, the Parliament of Poland passed a resolution recognizing the massacres as genocide.