Template: UPA

This song romanticizes the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a Ukrainian paramilitary group tied to OUN-B during the Second World War. The history of the group is contested in popular memory. Some remember them positively as a force that fought for Ukraine’s independence at great personal cost. Others remember them as a radical right-wing group responsible for carrying out large-scale ethnic cleansing in the course of their efforts to establish an independent state. The history of the organization and that time period is painful, difficult, and complex.

We don’t believe this song is so bad that it should never be sung, but we do ask that a more balanced history of the organization be taught and that our community remember that we could have been both the oppressed and the oppressors.