@misc{Masternak-Kubiak_Małgorzata_Status_2020,
 author={Masternak-Kubiak, Małgorzata and Przygodzki, Jacek},
 copyright={Copyright by Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego Sp. z o.o.},
 address={Wrocław},
 howpublished={online},
 year={2020},
 publisher={Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego},
 language={pol},
 abstract={The article is devoted to showing the origin and operations of the so-called Istriebitielne Battalions (IB): destruction battalions which functioned as military formations in the territory of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, and as an auxiliary service of the Red Army — often commanded by officers of the totalitarian NKVD — fought against units of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists — Bandera faction and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. The main ideologist of the OUN, Dmytro Dontsov, was fascinated by the fascist ideology emerging in Europe, thus following his ideologist and with its development the OUN and its largest group — Banderaʼs faction (OUN-B) evolved into a fascist one. The head of the OUN military department, Mychajło Kołodzinśkyj, after leaving prison in the Second Polish Republic, was also sent by the OUN to fascist Italy, where Benito Mussolini agreed to set up training camps for Ukrainian nationalists as well as for the Croatian Ustasha. There, creating a Ukrainian war doctrine, he predicted a bloody crackdown against Poles, Jews, and Russians. These predictions came true during the Second World War, and the tragic events in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia described in the article meet the Lemkinian definition of genocide as found in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the UN General Assembly on 9 December 1948. The article will not discuss the activities of the Istriebitielne Battalions in Lithuania and Belarus, because their operations were fundamentally different. They did not usually defend the Polish population, but were directed mainly against the pro-independence underground, assisting thetotalitarian NKVD. The second part of the paper is an analysis from the perspective of legal dogmatics of the Polishcourts’ jurisprudence in the matter of granting war veteran status to people who served in thedescribed formation. According to the current law, the participation of Polish citizens in theIstriebitielne Battalions, in the former Polish territories of the voivodeships of Lviv, Stanislaw, Tarnopol, and Volhynia in the years 1944–1945, in defence of the Polish population against Ukrainian nationalists, constitutes veteran activity. However, after the year 1989 this was not so obvious. The Head of the Office for War Veterans consistently took the position that under art. 21 (2)–(3) of the Law on War Veterans, a person who served in totalitarian NKVD formations or other repressive organs of the USSR, acting against the Polish Nation and State, is not entitled to war veteran privileges. In the jurisprudence of the Supreme Administrative Court, there was also alarge discrepancy in the applicability of the Law on War Veterans provisions concerning participation in combat as a part of the Istriebitielne Battalions. Therefore, due to the complexity of the problem, it seems most justified to analyse this procedure from a historical and jurisprudential point of view.},
 type={text},
 title={Status kombatanta z tytułu uczestnictwa w Istriebitielnych Batalionach (rozważania historycznoprawne i dogmatycznoprawne)},
 keywords={Istriebitielne Battalions, UPA, OUN-B, self-defence, Home Army, Volhynia, Eastern Galicia, genocide, war veterans, Supreme Administrative Court, Provincial Administrative Court, Constitutional Tribunal},
}