SUMMARY

In his comment on The Second Polish–Ukrainian War, Ihor Iliushyn addresses V’iatrovych’s claim about advancing a new and original interpretation of the Ukrainian–Polish conflict during World War II. He argues that this interpretation is neither new nor original. In fact, according to Iliushyn, V’iatrovych follows a well-established tradition of Ukrainian diaspora historiography in creating a false equivalency between Ukrainian and Polish crimes against civilians. To this interpretation, Iliushyn juxtaposes his own findings, which demonstrate that there was no direct connection between the Polish terror against Ukrainians (mostly those who collaborated with Nazi authorities) in 1942–47 and the ethnic cleansing of the Polish population perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists in 1943–44. These two campaigns, Iliushyn argues, were different in both scale and motivation, and any attempts to equate them end up justifying the unjustifiable.