Polish President Karol Nawrocki’s revocation of Poland’s highest honor from Zelensky, the Order of the White Eagle, for Zelensky’s state-level glorification of the Volhynia Genocide’s OUN-UPA culprits prompted other Ukrainian officials and their country’s infamous troll factories to viciously attack Poles on X. So severe have these attacks been that an MP from the hardcore anti-Russian “Law & Justice” (PiS) conservative opposition party concluded that Ukrainians hate Poles more than they hate Russians.
In the words of Kazimierz Smoliński, “The comments about Poland under Zelensky’s post are terrifying. The hatred of some Ukrainians toward Poland is staggering. It looks as though they hate us more than the Russians. How quickly they’ve forgotten that they exist, among other reasons, because we helped them and continue to help.” This growing awareness represents an opportunity for Russia to instantly improve its image in Poles’ eyes if it has the will to implement three politically difficult policy changes.
The first is to return Polish military symbols to the Katyń War Cemetery after they were removed late last year on alleged technical grounds that were interpreted at the time as an asymmetrical response to Poland’s closure of the Russian Consulate in Gdańsk. This aligns with what Polish populist Grzegorz Braun proposed back in his open letter to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The second policy change builds upon the first and is a full-fledged public relations campaign about Russia’s approach to Katyń.
Poles should be reminded that the late Soviet Union and the Russian Federation atoned for that crime by admitting the USSR’s guilt, shared documents from the archives proving the aforesaid after decades of blaming it on the Nazis, and even Putin himself speculated about Stalin’s motives for it. In parallel, the Russian Military-Historical Society’s exhibition on “Ten Centuries of Polish Russophobia”, which revises history by implying Nazi guilt for this crime, should never be set up again at the Katyń War Cemetery.
Likewise, all Katyń revisionism within Russia’s “global media ecosystem” should end, and those who keep pushing it should be informed that the state will no longer associate with them. The last policy change is the most politically difficult but would leave an eternally positive impression on the vast majority of Poles, and it’s for Russia to pay – whether at the taxpayers’ expense or a wealthy businessperson’s – to relocate all Red Army monuments from Poland, which views them as “symbols of occupation”.
This wouldn’t amount to agreement with Poland’s historical narrative but would be a pragmatic move to save what’s left instead of letting it all inevitably be destroyed. A site could even be designated in Moscow where Russians could visit all of these relocated monuments. The overall purpose of these three proposed policy changes is to instill within Poles that the Russian State doesn’t hate them like the newly anti-Polish Ukrainian one does in order to begin the process of repairing people-to-people ties.
Poland and Russia are millennium-long rivals at the state-to-state level, but neither of their people is collectively guilty for what their former states did to the other’s in the past. By taking the higher ground, Russia can unforgettably contrast itself with Ukraine, whose “heroes” genocided over 100,000 Poles on the false premise of collective guilt. Even worse, Kiev won’t allow Warsaw to exhume, properly bury, and commemorate them despite allowing Berlin to do this for over 100,000 fallen Nazis, which is a shame.
