The decision to carry out the "depolonization" of Volhynia and Polesia must have been made by the OUN (The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) between late 1942 and March, 1943. No directive to launch the operation has ever been published, nor is any evidence of its existence available, but there is no doubt that the activity was carefully planned.
- The OUN leaders hoped that both Soviet Russia and Poland would fall as a result of the German onslaught as in 1918. Struggling over the future borders, the OUN-UIA (the Ukrainian Insurgent Army) hoped to use the argument that there was no Polish population or military activity in the contested territories. The Bandera Movement used the same method of cleansing Poles from Galicia and Volhynia as the one widely employed by its political ally Germany: the physical extermination of the non-Ukrainian (or, speaking precisely, non-Galician) population.
- The OUN had prepared in advance an ideological justification of the operation. It was a concept of racial and ethnic superiority of Aryan Ukrainians, which was modeled on the fascist theory of the superior race allegedly representing the highest point of the development of mankind.
- The process of ethnic cleansing targeting the Polish population and the geography of the activity had been elaborately planned.
- The Polish nationality was the criterion for selecting terror targets. Thousands of testimonies of survivors show that Poles and children from intermarriages were killed in mixed families while Galicians and Ukrainians in them typically were not (though it is hard to discern a general rule in the situation as cases of mass slaughter of Ukrainians who sheltered Polish refugees from Volhynia have been reported in the Zhytomyr Province).
Comment: With what has recently happened in Ukraine, it's clear that their direct ideological descendants are just as barbaric.