Among the local population and Soviet partisans, members of Bulba's formation were always known as bulbovtsy (Russian) / bulbivtsi or bulbashi (Ukrainian).
By the end of June 1941 Taras Borovets, with support from German occupation forces officials, decided to create his own military formation.
By the beginning of August 1941 he obtained German permission to create an armed military formation which he named Polissian Sich.
The main tasks of this newly created formation was " by the order of German military command … establishing a self defense against Bolshevik regular and partisan units."
At the beginning of August, Borovets made an attempts to obtain military support from the two rival factions of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.
Stepan Bandera's OUN-B rejected his proposal while the OUN-M under Andriy Melnyk faction agreed to provide support.
From this time till the middle of November 1941, the Bulba formation controlled a large territory of northwest Ukraine which lay away from central roads.
Throughout the summer and autumn Taras Bulba-Borovets tried to find a compromise with German administration and even Nazi security police and SIPO representatives met several time with Borovets' UPA to negotiate future cooperation; such meetings did not have any known results.
During the autumn and winter of 1942, Borovets also conducted negotiations with Soviet partisans and reached tricky "non-aggression" agreement, which lasted until February 1943.
The steady loss of men to the rival UPA and the decline in peasant support prompted Borovets to rename his force the Ukrainian People's Revolutionary Army, although some of UPRA detachments were active even later.
[6] In late March 2019, former members of Polissian Sich and the Ukrainian People's Revolutionary Army were officially granted the status of veterans.
[7] There had been several previous attempts to provide former Ukrainian nationalist fighters with official veteran status, especially during the 2005–2009 administration President Viktor Yushchenko, but all failed.