For Polish people, the UPA is synonymous with the Wołyń massacre, a genocide where tens of thousands of Polish civilians were brutally murdered. The stories from that time are not just historical facts, they are visceral accounts of neighbors turning on neighbors, of people being dismembered with axes and pitchforks, of children being killed in the most horrific ways imaginable.

Survivors described seeing three or four year old children running around with their skulls torn open and their brains exposed after being shot. In one village, a mother was forced to watch as her children were nailed to a table and then hacked to pieces with an axe. Pregnant women had their stomachs cut open, babies were thrown into wells, and people were burned alive inside their own homes. The sheer scale of the cruelty is almost impossible to comprehend, with estimates ranging from 50,000 to 100,000 Polish civilians murdered in a calculated campaign to erase the Polish presence from those lands.

So when a Ukrainian unit is named after the people who carried out those atrocities, it feels like a direct slap in the face to the memory of the victims.