The Rada’s approval of Zelensky’s proposal to create a “national pantheon” that will almost certainly result in the state-level glorification of Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevich, the two most infamous of the Volhynia Genocide’s OUN-UPA culprits, will destroy political ties with Poland as argued here. It also exposed what head of the Polish President’s office Zbigniew Bogucki considers to be the acute civilizational differences between Poles and Ukrainians that most Poles have long ignored.
He was quoted by state media as having said that “glorifying Bandera and criminals does not fit within the values of Western civilization”, which aligns with the earlier expressed stance of his boss, President Karol Nawrocki. He declared that “Zelensky has proven that Ukraine is not ready to be part of the European family in terms of grappling with its own history, specifically, its glorification of thugs and murders from the ‘Ukrainian Insurgent Army’ (UPA)”. This viewpoint deserves some elaboration.
From the Polish perspective, Ukrainians have become more similar to Russians over the centuries than to Poles due to Russification and then Sovietization, which they consider to be civilizational variables. They still believe that Ukrainians and Russians are separate people, but it’s beginning to dawn on them that they’re more similar than previously thought. Zelensky’s glorification of the OUN-UPA is seen by average Poles, regardless of observers’ opinion on the issue, as spiritually similar to Russia’s glorification of Stalin.
That’s because both were responsible for the deaths of many Poles, Stalin much more so than the OUN-UPA due to the NKVD’s 1937 “Polish Operation” (the largest ethnic persecution during the Great Terror), Katyń, and Red Army operations against the “Home Army” near the end of World War II and after, et al. Poles therefore conflate the glorification of those two as expressions of non-Western civilization no matter how condescending some non-Poles might deem that to be. This is the political reality in Poland.
Poles have long considered themselves to be members of Western Civilization to the point of describing themselves as its “antemurale” (bulwark) against barbarism during the Commonwealth era. Although many of the people now known as Ukrainians were part of Poland’s civilization-state, they themselves were always distinct due to their language and Eastern Orthodox faith. The average descendent of “Old Rus” within the Commonwealth typically had much more in common with what later became Russia.
This was the basis upon which Russification and then Sovietization took place, which ordinary Poles nowadays belatedly came to believe severed Ukraine’s ties with Western Civilization, with Zelensky’s state-level glorification of the Volhynia Genocide’s OUN-UPA culprits being the apogee of this trend. According to Kazimierz Smoliński, an MP from the hardcore anti-Russian conservative opposition, “It looks as though [Ukrainians] hate us more than the Russians.” This is a popular view in today’s Poland.
After all, nearly 60% of Poles are now against Ukraine joining the EU, with this reversal being attributable to their awareness that Ukrainians are civilizationally incompatible with themselves and the West as a whole due to them glorifying anti-Polish genocidaires. This reminded many Poles of how Ukrainians also genocided them twice prior during Khmelnitsky’s Uprising in the mid-17th century and then during the “Koliszczyzna” a century later. The people-to-people rift between them might therefore be irreconcilable.
