95-year-old UPA liaison officer Mykola Negrych dies in Prykarpattia region
19 February 2025 15:23
Mykola Negrych, a liaison officer of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, died in Ivano-Frankivsk region at the age of 95. He was a relative of the prominent centurion Hrytsia Holynsky.
This was reported by the Delyatyn territorial community, "Komersant Ukrainian" reports.
It is noted that Negrych was the last witness and participant in the national liberation struggle during World War II in the village of Delyatyn, where he lived in recent years.
The veteran was born on December 19, 1929, when Prykarpattia was under Polish occupation. As a teenager, he became a liaison of the UPA. His relative, Hryts Holynskyi, fought for Ukraine as part of the Ukrainian Galician Army and later in the UPA.
Mykola Negrych will be buried on February 19 at the central old cemetery in Deliatyn.
The UPA was a military and political formation of the Ukrainian liberation movement that aimed to restore Ukrainian statehood.
The UPA was founded at the turn of 1942-1943 and operated until September 1949, after which it went into the armed underground, which lasted until the mid-1950s.
The Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance writes that more than 100,000 people went through the ranks of the UPA. More than half a million people were repressed by the USSR’s punitive authorities for participating in the insurgency or supporting it.
As of 2018, as noted in the explanatory note to the law “On the Legal Status and Commemoration of Fighters for the Independence of Ukraine in the XX Century,” there were about 1,200 living veterans of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the UPA in Ukraine.
