Former Polish Ambassador to Ukraine Bartosz Cichocki confirmed in a recent radio interview what many Poles already suspected and some might have even already heard about from their relatives regarding Ukraine’s discriminatory policies against the Polish minority. In his words, “There are no street beatings, but perhaps something worse is happening. The faithful have no right to regain their churches. Polish education is being restricted, and so on.”
Cichocki then revealed that the authorities don’t bring this up “in the name of some greater good, but everyone who travels, who has contacts and family ties, knows this perfectly well. The closer you get to the border with Poland, the worse it gets.” He then condemned Zelensky’s glorification of the Volhynia Genocide’s OUN-UPA culprits as well as Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart at an event in Cyprus the day after without bringing this up and thus tacitly approving of it.
The importance of Cichocki’s interview, however, rests in what he said about Ukraine’s Polish minority. For background, there are around 145,000 Poles still in the country, where their ancestors lived for nearly seven centuries since Kazimierz the Great expanded the then-Kingdom of Poland to there. So integral have the lands of modern-day Ukraine been to the formation of Poland’s distinct civilization-state that several kings, many military heroes, and numerous socio-cultural figures hailed from there.
The NKVD’s 1937 “Polish Operation” (the largest ethnic persecution during the Great Terror), the Volhynia Genocide, and post-war “population exchanges” drastically reduced the number of Poles to today’s paltry number, but their footprint remains through local architecture and especially churches. Even so, despite Russian foreign spy chief Sergey Naryshkin’s innuendo last year that Poland might try to reclaim these lands from Ukraine, there’s zero interest at the state and civil society levels alike for this.
The state adheres to the “Giedroyc Doctrine” of respecting the post-war geopolitical status quo while Poles don’t want to foot the bill for several million Ukrainians’ pensions nor do they want such a significant ethno-national minority in their largely homogenous country. It also goes without saying that Ukrainian nationalists might violently resist reincorporation into Poland seeing as how what’s nowadays Western Ukraine is the historical cradle of their movement. Neither the Polish State nor Poles want that.
The most that Poland might do in this regard is condition its continued financial and military support for Ukraine on Kiev safeguarding the rights of its Polish minority, but the ruling Ukrainophilic liberal coalition is unlikely to do this, so there’s little chance of this happening till after fall 2027’s next Sejm elections. A conservative-populist coalition might replace them, and despite the prior conservative government’s equally intense Ukrainophilia, they’ve since soured on it and now champion a more hardline approach.
In any case, Cichocki’s interview might spark a long-overdue discussion among Poles about the rights of their co-ethnics in Ukraine, which a potential conservative-populist coalition could bring up at the state level as yet another reason for stonewalling Ukraine’s EU accession bid. The odds of Ukraine improving their plight before then are low, especially amidst Zelensky’s new Polonophobic hate campaign for distracting from setbacks along the front, so this likely won’t happen till 2028 at the earliest.
