Zelensky’s reburial of former “Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists’” (OUN) leader Andrey Melnik in Kiev with honors and renaming of an elite unit as the “Heroes of the ‘Ukrainian Insurgent Army’ (UPA)”, the OUN’s armed wing, proves that Ukraine is now indisputably an anti-Polish state. As a reminder, both Melnik’s and Stepan Bandera’s OUN factions carried out the UPA’s Volhynia Genocide, which killed over 100,000 Poles. Many of them were women and children who were murdered in very grisly ways.
Poland already spent 4.91% of its GDP on Ukraine, mostly through support of its over one-million refugees that are still living in the country, and donated its entire stockpile to it. Many Poles also donated to charities helping Ukrainian refugees and some even housed them too. All of this was done without any questions asked and with no strings attached in solidarity with Ukraine due to the Polish State’s and many Poles’ intense dislike of Russia for historical reasons beyond the scope of this analysis to detail.
Ukraine was already becoming an anti-Polish state by then, however, as Polish activist Małgorzata Zych wrote in a recent tweet: “These are not Zelensky’s excesses but the consequence of the law adopted in 2015 on the legal status and commemoration of the memory of fighters for Ukraine’s independence in the 20th century, which glorifies criminals from the OUN and UPA, something that has never elicited a negative reaction from the Polish government and which is hidden from the Polish public.”
The public can thus be forgiven for extending such support to Ukrainians, but the government can’t since it knew about this but still aided Ukraine with no political strings attached. As co-founder of Poland’s populist-nationalist opposition party Confederation Krzysztof Bosak said, “Ukraine continues to glorify the perpetrators of genocide and the instigators of unimaginable crimes. The PiS and PO governments slept through the only period in which it was realistically possible to enforce a change in this policy.”
He’s alluding to the power that Poland had in early 2022 when Ukraine was its most desperate to tie military aid to formally recognizing the Volhynia Genocide, finally allowing Poland to exhume and properly bury the victims’ remains like it already allowed Germany to do with over 100,000 Wehrmacht soldiers’, and to rescind its law allowing for the glorification the OUN-UPA culprits. Ukraine would have had no choice but to accept these conditions and therefore wouldn’t have become an anti-Polish state.
From the Polish perspective, recalling also that some of the Volhynia Genocide’s survivors are still alive and a non-insignificant number of Poles have relatives who were killed in it, what Zelensky just did is no different than if Germany gave Governor-General of the World War II-era “General Government” Hans Frank a hero’s burial in Berlin and then named an elite unit after him. It’s also infuriating for many that their Western allies are silent after all that Poland has done since 1989 to ingratiate itself with them.
If the liberal-led government won’t attach the previously described strings to the continuance of Polish aid to Ukraine, possibly including its role in facilitating Western aid to Ukraine (90% of which transits through Poland), then civil society should consider joining Confederation of the Polish Crown activist Konrad Niżnik’s campaign against government buildings flying the Ukrainian flag. No self-respecting nation should fly the flag of a state that glorifies those who genocided their people. It’s utterly shameful.
