Vasyl Stepanovych Kuk was born in the village of
Krasne in
Austria-Hungary (now in
Lviv Oblast, Ukraine) on 11 January 1913 to a family of railway workers. He was baptised in the
Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church five days after his birth. Kuk was a gymnasium student in the city of
Zolochiv, and he later studied law at the
Catholic University of Lublin. There, Kuk became active in several Ukrainian youth organisations, such as
Plast, and
Prosvita. Kuk joined the
Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, a militant Ukrainian nationalist group, in 1929. In 1937 he went underground to escape the Polish police. In 1941, he became one of the
OUN-B's leaders. During World War II, he headed an OUN-organized anti-Nazi underground in
Dnipropetrovsk Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (now Dnipro, Ukraine) from 1942 to 1943, before returning to western Ukraine. He led the
People's Revolutionary Liberation Organisation, a socialist organ of the
Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in
Volhynia, as well as the UPA's . After leader
Roman Shukhevych's death in 1950, Kuk assumed the role of commander of the UPA and of the OUN in Ukraine. Kuk was captured by Soviet forces in 1954. After six years of imprisonment and interrogation, he was amnestied and allowed to move to
Kyiv. After obtaining a philosophy degree from
University of Kyiv, he worked at Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR before his eventual dismissal as an undesirable following the publication of his book
Marxism-Leninism about the Ukrainian National Question. In the 1990s he became active in UPA veteran affairs. ==Statement to the Ukrainians==