In June, 2009 Polish priest Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski organized a protest rally in front of the Ukrainian Embassy in Krakow against Yushchenko's politics of extolling the fighters from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UIA). The protesters also criticized the Polish administration which persistently ignores the problem.

The timing of the event was by no means random. In July, 1943 the OUN-UIA forces went on their first mission fighting... the civilian Polish population of Volhynia. The estimates of the resulting death toll range from 100,000 to 300,000 people. According to T. Isakowicz-Zalewski Ukrainian nationalists massacred 150,000 ethnic Poles in Ukraine alone.

Earlier in July, Isakowicz-Zalewski organized a similar event in Lublin, the city which was visited by Ukrainian President Yushchenko to celebrate the anniversary of the 1569 Lublin Unia. “The UIA guerrillas used to kill not only Poles, but also Armenians, Jews, and the Ukrainians who attempted to save Poles and Jews. Sadly, Ukrainian President V. Ushchenko and Prime Minister Yu. Tymoshenko, who are now in charge in the independent Ukraine, are concealing the truth and building monuments to the UIA criminals”, said the Polish priest. He promised that, despite the resistance his efforts are meeting with, new rallies will be held in front of Ukrainian diplomatic missions in Poland until the Ukrainian administration stops praising murderers and other criminals as heroes.

Rev. Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zalewski is not championing the cause alone. He is actively supported by the All-Polish Youth (Młodzież Wszechpolska) group and members of the club centered around Gazeta Polska, the only media outlet in Poland which – contrary to Warsaw's official positing – regularly invokes the theme of the atrocities perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists.

Isakowicz-Zalewski comes from a mixed Polish-Armenian family which lived in the Ternopil Oblast during World War II, so that his information about the crimes committed by the OUN-UIA comes directly from eyewitness accounts. Isakowicz-Zalewski has degrees in theology and in history, has authored several books, and is also known as a poet. He used to be an active member of the Solidarity Movement in the 1980ies and received a number of awards from the Polish government.

His disagreements with the Polish administration began already during the presidency of Lech Walesa who, like the current Polish authorities, was unwilling to let the UNA-UIA crimes become broadly known. In 2008 Rev. Tadeusz published a book titled “Subdued Genocide in Kresy” (Kresy is the term used to denote the eastern outskirts of Poland in the interregnum between the two World Wars - currently the territories of Volhynia and Galicia in Ukraine). He wrote that “no episode in the Polish history is hushed up and falsified to the same extent as the genocide against Poles in Volhynia and Galicia committed by the fascists from the OUN and UIA”.

The ferociousness of the OUN guerillas was oftentimes even more appalling than that of the SS. Isakowicz-Zalewski marshals an array of eyewitness accounts to prove that in the majority of cases the victims of the Ukrainian nationalists were women, children, elderly people, and clergymen. The book includes a long list of slain priests, many of whom were killed right in churches during services. OUN guerillas cut Roman Catholic priest K. Baran in the Korytnica village with a saw. Ya. Valniciek, another Roman Catholic priest, was killed in Buczacz with outrageous cruelty: his skin was peeled off and ink and boiling water were spilled on his wounds. Some priests were mortified painfully and slowly by being thrown into wells and stoned, others died after nails were driven into their heads.

Those whom the current Ukrainian President regards as heroes had no mercy even for nuns and children. Sister Trudzińska was burned alive in a monastery together with the orphan girls she was taking care of. Ukrainian nationalists cut off women's breasts, tongues, noses, hands, and legs. Pregnant women were disemboweled and children were crucified on fences and trees or torn apart by pulling their legs. Parents were forced to watch their children being killed and vice versa. Other authors – V. Polischuk from Canada, Prof. Maslovski from Lviv who died under suspicious circumstances shortly upon publishing his book “On whose side and against whom Ukrainian nationalists fought during World War II”, Polish historians sister and brother Semashko, and E. Pruss provide similar accounts of Ukrainian nationalists’ atrocities.

The crimes and the position of the clergy of the Greek Catholic Church at the time they were committed are interlocking themes. Rev. Tadeusz stresses that “those who perpetrated the atrocities in Kresy were not radical Islamists or communist atheists, but individuals from the Greek-Catholic flock”. Yet, the crimes were not condemned by Greek Catholic hierarchs. Isakowicz-Zalewski attributes their silence to the position of the head of the Greek Catholic church Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky who acted as the spiritual leader of the OUN.

In one of the chapters of Isakowicz-Zalewski's book - “Poles against Poles” - he scrutinizes the pertinent aspects of the current political situation. Isakowicz-Zalewski writes: “My criticism is focused not so much on the mostly primitive and uneducated Ukrainian nationalists as on the Polish administration which is afraid that the genocide will be exposed”. 88-year old J. Nevinski, an eyewitness of the OUN atrocities, has been making efforts for years in the hope that an unusual monument – a 5-meter bronze tree with wings carrying corpses of children instead of leaves – will be erected at one of Warsaw's squares. The monument would commemorate the victims of the OUN-UIA. Polish sculptor M. Konieczny acclaimed for the monument to the Warsaw uprising – the Warsaw Nike - is the author of the design. Konieczny was born in a region which currently belongs to Ukraine but was a part of Poland before World War II. His concept of the monument intended to reflect the sufferings of the Polish population in 1943-1944 was inspired by the 1943 Kozova village photographs. Most of the victims of the UIA raid against the place (now in the Ternopil Oblast) were children.

The speaker of the Polish parliament (Marshal of the Sejm) B. Komorowski altogether barred the issue from hearings. He cited a paper in the Ukrainian media claiming that the project and other Kresy-related issues are promoted by... Moscow lobbyists. In a marked synchronism Polish President L. Kaczynski and Prime Minister D. Tusk, the two politicians that otherwise perpetually disagree, refused to attend a conference dedicated to the genocide against Poles in Volhynia and Galicia. Perhaps, they were worried about being perceived as Moscow's agents.

Similarly, the left Polish Europarliamentarians rejected the possibility of submitting the genocide issue to the European parliament. It is a historical paradox that in 1980 former Polish President A. Kwasniewsky who in that distant epoch was a member of the Communist Party, regarded Solidarity activist Isakowicz-Zalewski as an agent of the US, but these days the entire Polish elite – the left and the right alike – speaks of “the hand of Moscow” in connection with the defiant priest. Then, whose hand is manipulating the official Warsaw and why is it whitewashing war criminals?

Isakowicz-Zalewski is literally showered with allegations. The pro-US Gazeta Vyborcza was the first to launch an attack. Opponents charge the priest with nationalism and attempts to split the Polish and the Ukrainian nations (Gazeta Vyborcza prefers not to mention how most Ukrainians actually feel about the nationalist war-time guerillas). Some critics unabashedly liken Isakowicz-Zalewski to E. Steinbach, the leader of the Federation of Expellees (Bund der Vertriebenen) which is an organization of German civilians forcibly moved with a high death toll from Poland and Czechoslovakia to Germany in 1945.

Asked about the reasons behind the strange conduct of the Polish administration, Isakowicz-Zalewski replied: “Poles are convinced that heirs to the traditions of the OUN-UIA are at the helm in Ukraine while the official Warsaw is covering up the genocide... because that's what Washington wants it to do”.

The courageous priest is not the only person holding the view. Popular Polish journalist M. Sladewska wrote: “The US umbrella protecting the heirs to the OUN-UIA is to blame for the fact that the creation of the independent Ukraine commenced on the basis of the design belonging to a criminal organization which cooperated closely with the Nazi Germany... Polish presidents from Valesa and on acted in line with Washington's geopolitical strategy. As a result they found themselves on the side of the resurrected vampires of the past, supporting the forces of the Ukrainian nationalism with their Banderian mainstream formerly employed for sabotage and espionage”. Such is the answer to the question: who and why patronizes the “resurrected vampires” from the OUN-UIA.