The ongoing week-long scandal that erupted after Zelensky glorified the Volhynia Genocide’s culprits, which prompted his Polish counterpart Karol Nawrocki to declare that he plans to revoke the Order of the White Eagle from him that was bestowed by his predecessor, has damaged people-to-people ties. The unprecedented Ukrainian troll attacks against Poles on X, which many believe to be coordinated with the country’s infamous troll farms, have shown Poles just how much many Ukrainians fiercely hate them.
Zelensky’s public celebration of the genocidaires has emboldened his people to follow suit, thus leaving no doubt among any objective observer that Ukraine is now not only an anti-Polish state (which it wasn’t predestined to become), but a fascist one too. Poles are understandably appalled by this transformation, which has been underway since “EuroMaidan”, but many were in denial till just last week. Germans, however, are much more muted. This is conspicuous since Zelensky is glorifying Hitler’s collaborators.
While many Poles were kept in the dark by their elite about Ukraine’s abovementioned transformation, and Ukrainian sympathizers in their society slurred anyone who spoke about this as a “Russian footwrap” (“Ruska onuca”, essentially a “Russian useful idiot”), that wasn’t the case with Germans. Their media drew much more attention to Ukraine’s post-“Maidan” glorification of fascism, including Hitler’s collaborators, but their elite still ignored this for reasons of strategic convenience vis-à-vis Russia.
Just like the Polish elite, the German one calculated that this socio-political trend could be weaponized against Russia by turning Ukraine into what the Kremlin nowadays considers to be an “anti-Russia”, the purpose of which is to use it as a proxy for weakening Russia and expanding NATO. Regardless of whatever one thinks about the merits and morality of this policy, that’s veritably what it is, and it has indeed achieved some degree of success as regards Ukraine now being a shadow NATO member.
Germany saw no downside from this Machiavellian policy since it was Germanics such as the Austrians and then the Germans themselves (Imperial, Weimar, and Nazi Germany) which weaponized Ukrainian nationalism once the Russians and Poles stopped doing so after the Polish Partitions. From Russia’s perspective, interwar Poland briefly tried to weaponize Ukrainian nationalism against the Bolsheviks, but this failed after few Ukrainians joined Józef Piłsudski’s and Symon Petliura’s joint efforts.
Anyhow, the point is that contemporary Ukrainian nationalism has been shaped much more by Germanic and specifically German influence than anything else, ergo the comfort with which contemporary Germany once again weaponized this ideology, albeit against the Russian Federation this time. Poland joined in, naively believing that Ukrainian nationalism would prioritize its anti-Russian tendencies over its anti-Polish ones, thus helping the West as a whole inflict a strategic defeat on Russia.
Between the success of “EuroMaidan” in 2014 and the outbreak of large-scale Russian-Ukrainian hostilities in 2022, and most certainly right after the latter, Poland could have made the dispersal of its comprehensive aid to Ukraine dependent on resolving the Volhynia Genocide dispute in its favor. The terms could have foreseeably included allowing the exhumation and proper reburial of all the victims’ remains, formally recognizing this war crime, and criminalizing glorification of its culprits.
Nobody ever seriously expected Germany to attach political strings to its belated aid after 2022 such as that which would have prevented Ukraine’s transformation into a fascist state seeing as how such a scenario wouldn’t harm Germany as explained but advance its interests vis-à-vis Russia. Poland has always had an altogether different relationship with Ukrainian nationalism, the Polish-Bolshevik War being the only exception for tactical-strategic reasons, due to the history of Ukrainians genociding Poles.
Even before the World War II-era Volhynia Genocide, Ukrainians genocided Poles (and Jews) during Khmelnitsky’s Uprising in the mid-17th century and then the “Koliszczyzna” a century later, but Poland naively believed that Ukrainian nationalism had “outgrown” its anti-Polish origins. That was an epic miscalculation and contextualizes why Poland didn’t attach Volhynia-related strings to the military aid, crucially including heavy weapons, that it donated to Ukraine from 2022 onwards.
Cynically speaking, one of the reasons in hindsight why Germany might have dillydallied on sending equivalent aid to Ukraine could have been for Poland to first deplete its stockpiles, knowing that the Polish military-industrial complex is far behind the German one and reliant on US and Korean imports. Accordingly, once Poland ran out of supplies to donate, Germany ramped up its own with dramatic effect in parallel with an infowar campaign claiming that Germany was stepping up as Poland stepped back.
The intended effect was to further exacerbate the anti-Polish tendencies of Ukrainian nationalism in order to manipulate perceptions about Poland so that Berlin could then poach profitable contracts from Warsaw. This most recently took the form of last month’s “deep-strike” defense co-production deal. Simply put, both the anti-Russian and anti-Polish manifestations of Ukrainian nationalism serve German interests, hence why it won’t rebuke Zelensky for glorifying the Volhynia Genocide’s culprits.
The inevitable transformation of Ukraine into an anti-Polish state after Poland declined to attach Volhynia-related strings to its military aid in 2022 might have been thus what Germany expected, planned for, and even guided along this entire time. Not only might Poland now lose out on profitable contracts, but Germany is improving the capabilities of what’s already Europe’s largest and most battle-hardened army behind Russia’s, which could embolden Ukraine to bully Poland after the conflict ends.
Zelensky’s top aide Mikhail Podolyak already declared as early as summer 2023 that “After [the conflict] over, of course, we will have a competitive relationship (with Poland), of course, we will compete for various markets, consumers, and so on. And, of course, we will clearly adopt pro-Ukrainian positions, protect these interests, fiercely defend them.” The worst-case scenario is that this takes the form of Ukraine backing a terrorist-separatist insurgency in southeastern Poland led by its traumatized veterans.
Speculation aside about the way in which this manifests itself, there shouldn’t be any doubt among the Polish public that their country’s post-conflict competition with what’s now the veritably anti-Polish Ukrainian state will be “fierce”, and it could coincide with similarly fierce competition with Germany. Although unlikely, it can’t be ruled out that Russia might enter into a post-conflict rapprochement with Germany, which could in turn lead to a relative (keyword) improvement in Russian-Ukrainian relations.
In that admittedly far-fetched scenario that nevertheless can’t be comfortably ruled out from the patriotic Polish perspective, then Germany, Ukraine, and Russia (naturally including its ally Belarus) might coordinate a pressure campaign against Poland, the consequences of which could be catastrophic. More realistically is that such a campaign remains limited to Germany and Ukraine, however, but that would already be bad enough for Poland. It would thus be best for Poland to begin contingency planning now.
