A teenager in Poland committed acts of sabotage for Russia

The 18-year-old man was accused of arranging to fly drones over the car of Polish President Karol Nawrocki during the Polish Armed Forces Day parade held in Warsaw on August 15 last year. He was arrested three days before the event.

The suspect, who faces up to life in prison if convicted, recruited people to participate in the crime and made payments using cryptocurrencies registered in Russia and China, ABW said.

According to prosecutors, Ilya K was contacted by an unidentified person through a mail service. He sent back photos to prove his actions.

He vandalized the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial to the Jewish Heroes in the Polish capital and the monuments to the Polish victims of the Volhynian pogroms in Domostawa and Wroclaw, placing inscriptions and signs praising the UPA.

In 1943 and 1944, as the UPA fought to create an independent Ukraine for Ukrainians, up to 100,000 Polish minorities were killed in the Volhynia massacre in what was then Poland and now western Ukraine.

The painful case has soured relations between the neighbors ever since. At times, Kiev blocked Poland’s request to exhume victims’ bodies from mass graves.

The killings rose again in May, when Zelensky named a Ukrainian military unit after “UPA heroes.”

In response, Nawrocki stripped the Ukrainian leader of Poland’s highest state honor – the Order of the White Eagle – an honor that had only happened once before in 300 years.

According to Wojciech Kononczuk, director of the Warsaw Office of Oriental Studies, Poles and Ukrainians see the UPA differently.

“They are heroes to the Ukrainians because they fought the Soviets,” he told the BBC in a recent interview. “Several years after the Second World War, the UPA was fighting the Soviet invasions, so Ukrainians want to remember the part of the history of its formation after 1945. So they do not know or do not want to know what the activities of the UPA were before 1945.”

“For the police, the UPA was a criminal structure responsible for the mass murder of the Polish people. At the same time, the level of knowledge in Poland about the history of the UPA after the Second World War – they were basically fighters against the Soviets – is a knowledge that is often absent in Polish society,” he added.