Inside Putin’s plan to send students to war <\/a><\/p>\nLessons look a little different at some universities and technical colleges around Russia this year, as the Kremlin tries to entice students to enlist in the military to cover massive casualties in Ukraine.<\/p>\n
During and after World War Two, when Ukraine belonged to the Soviet Union, the UPA fought against the Red Army, for a time allying itself with the Nazi German invaders, to seek Ukrainian independence.<\/p>\n
Ukraine says the naming of the unit carries no “anti-Polish intent” and was chosen by soldiers who wanted to commemorate others who had fought against Moscow.<\/p>\n
![\"Young](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/19ad17bb3403f64473ce1cb7f51b8e32.jpeg\")
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Re-enactors depicting soldiers of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in 2010. (Reuters: Ihor Khomych)<\/p>\n
But the UPA was also involved in the Volhynia massacres carried out by Ukrainian nationalists from 1943 to 1945, in which Warsaw says about 100,000 ethnic Poles were killed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Thousands of Ukrainians also died in reprisal killings.<\/p>\n
Polish historians view the massacres as a genocide intended to prevent a post-war Polish state claiming sovereignty over Ukrainian-majority areas that had been part of Poland between the two world wars.<\/p>\n
Kyiv rejects the term, saying thousands of Ukrainians were also killed in what was a complex conflict.<\/p>\n
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A veteran of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army marching in a rally organised by far right groups in 2016. (Reuters: Valentyn Ogirenko)<\/p>\n
The events have been a bone of contention for decades, even as Poland strongly backed Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion, taking in almost a million refugees and supplying weapons.<\/p>\n
In 1947, within new borders after World War Two, Poland forcibly relocated some 140,000 ethnic Ukrainians and people identifying as members of the small Lemko ethnic group from south-eastern Poland to territories it had regained from Germany.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The aim was to cut support for underground UPA groups in Poland, but the Ukrainian side considers it a crime of ethnic cleansing.<\/p>\n
Demands for exhumations in Ukraine<\/p>\n
Successive Polish governments have, with limited success, demanded access to the sites in western Ukraine that were once part of Poland, where UPA massacres took place.<\/p>\n
However, last year, Poland began exhuming the remains of Poles killed in the former Polish village of Puzhnyky and, last week, Kyiv gave permission for more exhumations in Volhynia’s Liuboml district.<\/p>\n
![\"Polish](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/0c8f15d440dd4d253b09a7ac9fc05a11.jpeg\")
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Karol Nawrocki has tapped into the Polish public’s weariness with the large number of Ukrainians in Poland. (Reuters: Ints Kalnins)<\/p>\n
Nationalist President Nawrocki<\/p>\n
Nawrocki, a conservative nationalist historian inspired by US President Donald Trump, has repeatedly accused Kyiv of stalling on requests for exhumations and urged it to denounce the Volhynia massacre as genocide.<\/p>\n
Russia’s ‘highway to hell’ logistics routes<\/a><\/p>\nUkraine has developed AI-enabled drones capable of making precision strikes from hundreds of kilometres away, and it means using Russia’s vital logistics routes has become a dangerous “lottery”.<\/p>\n
Nawrocki has tapped into weariness with the large number of Ukrainians in Poland and, during his campaign, vowed not to ratify any Ukrainian accession to NATO to avoid provoking Russia, departing from previous Polish policy and angering Kyiv.<\/p>\n
Critics have accused Nawrocki of promoting an approach to history teaching that whitewashes difficult parts of Poland’s past.<\/p>\n
Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Poland is weighing whether to strip Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of its top honour for renaming an army…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11034,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1375,8221,9,8222,481,1672,7322,45,3268],"class_list":["post-11033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-poland","tag-genocide","tag-nazi-germany","tag-poland","tag-polish-president-karol-nawrocki","tag-russia-ukraine-war","tag-soviet-union","tag-ukrainian-insurgent-army","tag-warsaw","tag-zelensky"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11033\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"People](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/3688169b5cc12c0e0d6be0c9e37433d1.jpeg\")
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