[9] At the same time, its forces fought an evenly matched war against the Polish resistance,[10] during which the UPA carried out massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia,[11] resulting in between 50,000 and 100,000 deaths.

Officially, the UPA's last military engagement occurred in October 1956, when remnants of the group fought on the Hungarian border region in support of that country's revolution.

[41][42] In 1944, the Soviets captured a Polikarpov Po-2 aircraft and one armored car and one personnel carrier from the UPA; however, it was not stated that they were in operable condition, while no OUN/UPA documents noted the usage of such equipment.

[46] A captured German document of 25 November 1941 (Nuremberg Trial O14-USSR) ordered:"It has been ascertained that the Bandera Movement [OUN-B] is preparing a revolt in the Reichskommissariat which has as its ultimate aim the establishment of an independent Ukraine.

All functionaries of the Bandera Movement must be arrested at once and, after thorough interrogation, are to be liquidated..."[47]At the Second Conference of the OUN-B, held in April 1942, the policies for the "creation, build-up and development of Ukrainian political and future military forces" and "action against partisan activity supported by Moscow" were adopted.

[49][better source needed] The relationship between Ukrainian Insurgent Army and Nazi Germany was complex and varied on account of the intertwined interests of the two actors, as well as the decentralized nature of the UPA.

[54] According to the OUN/UPA, on 12 May 1943, Germans attacked the town of Kolki using several SS-Divisions (SS units operated alongside the Wehrmacht who were responsible for intelligence, central security, policing action, and mass extermination), where both sides suffered heavy losses.

The UPA systematically sends agents, mainly young women, into the enemy-occupied territory, and the results of the intelligence are communicated to Department 1c of the [German] Army Group" on the southern front.

[65] Adopting a strategy analogous to that of the Chetnik leader General Draža Mihailović,[66] the UPA limited its actions against the Germans in order to better prepare itself for and engage in the struggle against the Communists.

[67][68] In March 1943, the OUN-B (specifically Mykola Lebed[69][unreliable source]) imposed a collective death sentence on all Poles living in the former east of the Second Polish Republic, and a few months later, local units of the UPA were instructed to complete the operation soon.

The “hatchet men,” to their shame, butcher and hang defenceless women and children.... By such work Ukrainians not only do a favor for the SD [German security service], but also present themselves in the eyes of the world as barbarians.

We must take into account that England will surely win this war, and it will treat these “hatchet men” and lynchers and incendiaries as agents in the service of Hitlerite cannibalism, not as honest fighters for their freedom, not as state-builders.

[90] After Galicia had been taken over by the Red Army, many units of the UPA abandoned the anti-Polish course of action and some even began cooperating with local Polish anti-Communist resistance against the Soviets and the NKVD.

One of the most notable joint actions of the UPA and the post-Home Army Freedom and Independence Association (WiN) took place in May 1946, when the two partisan formations coordinated their attack and took over of the city of Hrubieszów.

However, unlike in Volhynia, most of the casualties occurred after 1944 and involved UPA soldiers and Ukrainian civilians on one side, and members of the Polish Communist Security Office (UB) and Border Protection Troops (WOP).

[92] The total number of local Soviet partisans acting in Western Ukraine was never high, due to the region enduring only two years of German rule (in some places even less).

[101] By the autumn of 1944, UPA forces enjoyed virtual freedom of movement over an area of 160,000 square kilometers in size and home to over 10 million people, and had established a shadow government.

In a typical incident in the Lviv region, in front of horrified villagers, UPA troops gouged out the eyes of two entire families suspected of reporting on insurgent movements to Soviet authorities, before hacking their bodies to pieces.

A. Stoiantsev, out of 42,175 operations and ambushes against the UPA by destruction battalions in Western Ukraine, only 10 percent had positive results – in the vast majority there was either no contact or the individual unit was disarmed and pro-Soviet leaders murdered or kidnapped.

Even within the dangerous context of Soviet state service in the late-Stalin era, West Ukraine was considered to be a "hardship post", and personnel files reveal higher rates of transfer requests, alcoholism, nervous breakdowns, and refusal to serve among NKVD field agents there at that time.

[76]: 125–130 The Soviet authorities tried to win over the local population by making significant economic investments in Western Ukraine,[citation needed] and by setting up rapid reaction groups in many regions to combat the UPA.

[97] In 1951, CIA covert operations chief Frank Wisner estimated that some 35,000 Soviet police troops and Communist party cadres had been eliminated by guerrillas affiliated with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the period after the end of World War II.

[119] Soviet infiltration of British intelligence also meant that MI6 assisted in training some of the guerrillas in parachuting and unmarked planes used to drop them into Ukraine from bases in Cyprus and Malta, were counter-acted by the fact that one MI6 agent with knowledge of the operation was Kim Philby.

[135][full citation needed] According to Herbert Romerstein, Soviet propaganda complained about Zionist membership in the UPA,[136] and during the persecution of Jews in the early 1950s, they described the alleged connection between Jewish and Ukrainian nationalists.

She is alleged to have written, "I attribute the fact that I am alive today and devoting all the strength of my thirty-eight years to a free Israel only to God and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

[142] Since Ukraine's independence in 1991, there have been heated debates about the possible award of official recognition to former UPA members as legitimate combatants, with the accompanying pensions and benefits due to war veterans.

[18] Prior to December 2018, legally only former UPA members who "participated in hostilities against Nazi invaders in occupied Ukraine in 1941–1944, who did not commit crimes against humanity and were rehabilitated" were recognized as war veterans.

[citation needed] Two Czech films by František Vláčil, Shadows of the Hot Summer (Stíny horkého léta, 1977) and The Little Shepherd Boy from the Valley (Pasáček z doliny, 1983) are set in 1947, and feature UPA guerrillas in significant supporting roles.

The first film resembles Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971), in that it is about a farmer whose family is taken hostage by five UPA guerrillas, and he has to resort to his own ingenuity, plus reserves of violence that he never knew he possessed, to defeat them.

Insurgent songs express an open call to battle and to revenge against the enemies of Ukraine, as well as love for the country and devotion to her revolutionary leaders (Bandera, Chuprynka and others).