The 18-year-old was also accused of making preparations to fly a drone over Polish President Karol Nawrocki’s vehicle during last year’s Polish Armed Forces Day parade in Warsaw on August 15. He was arrested three days before the event took place.

The suspect, who faces life in prison if convicted, allegedly recruited people to participate in the crimes, using cryptocurrencies registered in Russia and China to pay them, the ABW said.

According to prosecutors, Illia K received assignments from an unidentified person via a courier service. He sent photographs showing that he had completed the tasks.

He allegedly vandalized the Monument to the Jewish Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto in the Polish capital and monuments to the Polish victims of the Volyhnia massacre in Domostawa and Wrocław, placing inscriptions and symbols glorifying the UPA.

Up to one hundred thousand members of the Polish minority population of what was then Poland and is now Western Ukraine were killed during the Volyhnia massacre in 1943 and 1944, as the UPA fought to create an independent Ukraine for Ukrainians.

The painful issue has affected relations between neighbors ever since. kyiv sometimes banned Polish requests to exhume the remains of mass grave victims, although exhumations have resumed.

The massacre was resurrected in May when Zelensky issued a decree naming a Ukrainian military unit the “Heroes of the UPA.”

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

Poles and Ukrainians view the UPA very differently, said Wojciech Konończuk, director of the Warsaw Office of Oriental Studies.

“For Ukrainians they are heroes because they fought against the Soviets,” he told the BBC in a recent interview. “Many years after World War II, the UPA was fighting against the Soviet occupation, so Ukrainians only want to remember that part of the history of the formation after 1945. Therefore, they do not know, or do not want to know, what the activities of the UPA were before 1945.”

“For Poles, the UPA was a criminal structure responsible for the mass killing of the Polish population. At the same time, the level of knowledge in Poland about the history of the UPA after World War II – they were basically fighters against the Soviets – is generally non-existent knowledge in Polish society,” he added.