Poland and Ukraine’s bloody past overshadows their anti-Russia alliance

WARSAW — Poland and Ukraine are close allies when it comes to defeating their common enemy Russia — but they also have their own bloodstained history which is straining their relations. 

During World War II a guerrilla group called the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (known by its Ukrainian acronym UPA) slaughtered tens of thousands of Poles in an effort to ethnically cleanse lands that had been part of Poland before the war but are now in western Ukraine.

Thousands of Ukrainians died in retaliatory attacks; some Ukrainian historians put part of the blame for the killings on long-standing Polish repression of Ukrainian national aspirations before the war.

Responsibility for the killings, known in Poland as the Volhynia Massacre, is a continued sore point between Warsaw and Kyiv, and in recent weeks has risen to the top of the political agenda in both capitals.

Poland is even threatening to block Ukraine’s future membership in the European Union until Kyiv takes responsibility for the killings and allows for the exhumation and reburial of thousands of victims.

“Ukraine will not join the European Union … unless the issue is settled, exhumations are carried out, and proper commemoration takes place,” Poland’s Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz said last Wednesday.

He was echoing earlier comments by Polish PM Donald Tusk, who warned in August:“Ukraine will, one way or another, have to live up to Polish expectations … Ukraine will not be a member of the European Union without Polish consent. Ukraine must meet standards, and they are multiple. It is not just a question of trade, border, legal and economic standards. It is also a question of cultural and political standards.” 

That threat is buttressed by Poland taking over the rotating EU Council presidency next year. 

“When are we supposed to make these demands?” Kosiniak-Kamysz also said, adding that “anti-Ukrainian sentiment in Poland is only going to increase if we don’t bring it up now.”

That is prompting Ukraine to try to calm Polish anger. 

Ukraine is “ready to talk” about the difficult legacy of the Polish-Ukrainian wartime conflict, Foreign Minister Andrij Sybiha wrote on social media on Wednesday, the night of his visit to Warsaw. 

“We discussed specific technical, not political steps, to finally resolve the issue of exhumation, which has been poisoning our political dialogue for a long time. There should be no political obstacles,” Sybiha wrote, adding that the past “cannot threaten … the future in the Euro-Atlantic family.”

Long-standing tensions

The wartime massacres have been an irritant in relations between the two countries for decades — and the issue returns frequently despite Poland’s unequivocal support for Kyiv since Russia’s invasion. 

Polish President Andrzej Duda and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy last year held a joint commemoration of the killings in the west Ukrainian city of Lutsk — with both men paying tribute to the “innocent victims.”

Ukraine says both sides have to forgive and ask for forgiveness for what Kyiv calls a “tragedy” but not a massacre — a characterization Poland rejects.

Despite that ceremony, the issue won’t die — resurfacing again this summer.

Under pressure from Poland, Ukraine softened its position last week. The country’s National Institute of National Memory said that, in response to “requests from Polish citizens,” it will add searching for the remains of massacre victims to its work plan in 2025.

Still, neither Sybiha, the diplomacy chief, nor the institute were explicit on details such as whether “resolving the issue of exhumation” means meeting Poland’s demands in full. 

In fact, Anton Drobovych, the institute’s head, went so far as to say that Poland chose to apply “pressure without understanding” Ukraine’s position on the issue.

Poland “is not interested” in finding an actual solution to the dispute and has disregarded the fact that Ukraine did carry out field work related to the Volhynia Massacre and commemorated the victims, for example in the region of Ternopil last year, Drobovych wrote in a column for the European Pravda news website.

Old wounds

In Poland, the events in Volhynia are very much an unhealed wound, resonating across generations of Poles who survived the massacres and passed the memories on to their children and grandchildren.

“What matters to me is that my surviving aunts, whose families were murdered, can finally have a proper place to mourn,” Karolina Romanowska, the granddaughter of a survivor, told POLITICO. Romanowska is one of the group of Polish citizens who requested exhumations and burial.

Her grandfather — then 13 years old — survived an UPA attack in May 1943 on the village of Uhly, some 65 kilometers from today’s Polish-Ukrainian border. The attack left 18 other members of Romanowska’s family dead amid an overall death toll of over 100.

“We have cleansed Uhly of the Poles,” Vasyl Levkovych, a UPA member who took part in the attack, wrote in his memoirs, a Polish book on the events noted. 

While there is a need for historical justice, both sides have to be careful, Romanowska said.

“There is a risk that the Polish-Ukrainian dispute on Volhynia may be used by some European countries that don’t want Ukraine in the EU. They might try to blame Poland for a potential derailment of the membership talks. Polish politicians need to be aware of this,” she said.

Romanowska now leads the Poland-Ukraine Reconciliation Association striving to bridge the clashing historical memories. 

For Poland, the events in Volhynia were a brutal ethnic cleansing; in 2016, the Polish Parliament voted to recognize the mass killings of Poles as a “genocide of Polish people committed by Ukrainian nationalists in 1943-1945.” 

In Ukraine, however, the memory of the wartime struggles to create an independent state is that of heroism and one that inspires today’s generation fighting off Russian invaders. Levkovych, the perpetrator from Uhly, has a street named after him in a Ukrainian village near Lviv.

Stepan Bandera, the far-right nationalist Ukrainian leader whose vision of an ethnically pure Ukraine inspired UPA and whose branch of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) is accused of having participated in the Holocaust alongside Nazi Germany, is celebrated as a national hero in Kyiv while many Poles see him as a war criminal. Russia also attacks the Ukrainian government for glorifying Bandera.

Still, Poland is walking on thin ice linking its otherwise justified historical demands to the issue of Ukraine’s membership talks with the EU, warned Piotr Buras, head of the European Council on Foreign Relations office in Warsaw.

“We can talk forever about Polish and Ukrainian history and where all grievances are coming from,” Buras said. “But it’s another thing to link it all with the European Union’s enlargement. Ukraine joining the EU is in the strategic interest of Poland. To say that the issue of Volhynia is more important than Ukraine’s integration with the EU is turning the matter on its head.”

Domestic political battles

Duda recently echoed the sentiment expressed by Buras.

“If someone says that they will block Ukraine’s access to the European Union, they are in line with Vladimir Putin’s policy,” Duda told Polsat News, a broadcaster, last week.

Duda lambasting the Tusk government over Volhynia is also a reflection of how the issue is entangled in domestic politics.

In Poland, the Tusk camp is playing hardball ahead of next year’s presidential election, hoping not to alienate right-wing voters in the stand-off against a candidate fielded by Law and Justice (PiS), the main opposition party backed by Duda.

“I get the impression that the [Tusk-led] coalition wants to get at least some votes of the so-called patriots, who are demanding Ukraine’s unconditional acknowledgement of guilt for Volhynia,” said Jan Piekło, Polish ambassador to Kyiv from 2016 to 2019.

In Ukraine, Piekło added, Zelenskyy has to be careful about not denouncing the country’s past while he’s fighting for its survival.

“Poland is not at war with Russia, Ukraine is. The legend of the UPA serves to boost Ukraine’s wartime morale, something that Ukrainians cannot afford to neglect,” said Piekło.

Ukrainian anger

Ukrainians have their own historical grievances. The number of Ukrainians killed by Poles in self-defense or retaliation in the 1940s has been put at between 10,000 and 15,000.

Right after the end of World War II, Poland’s then-communist government forcibly resettled many Ukrainians who remained in the country, deporting them from their homelands in the southeast of the country.

Ukraine has also complained for years about a monument in Monasterz, Poland, near the border with Ukraine. The monument, which honors UPA soldiers killed by the Soviets in 1945, was vandalized in 2015. Somebody smashed the plaque listing the soldiers’ names and defaced Ukrainian crosses. 

After years of back-and-forth, the monument was restored, but without reinstating the names. The Ukrainian side has been pushing for the full list of victims to be added back to the memorial.

It would just be a small part of a broader historical reconciliation between two peoples who have rubbed along for centuries.

“I think that Ukrainians should admit their guilt in the tragedy and Poles should admit theirs. Because it is obvious that the Ukrainians committed these atrocities, but what was it that led to this? Poland with its policy towards Ukrainians living under its rule,” said Yaroslav Hrytsak, a Ukrainian historian.

The bad blood dates from long before the Second World War.

Poland controlled much of what is today’s western Ukraine for centuries. The pre-war Polish state considered the Ukrainian minority dangerous and persecuted it. 

“Ukrainians do not want to admit responsibility for Volhynia, and Poles do not want to admit responsibility for Polish policy towards Ukrainians, which led to this tragedy. We have an impasse that could be overcome if there was political will on both sides,” Hrytsak said.

But Warsaw says that the dispute must not be framed as being two equivalent issues.

“Poland doesn’t want to escalate this but the question of burial and honoring these people is important to us. We’re talking about 100,000 killed people,” a foreign ministry official told POLITICO.

“We can talk about the [communist-era] resettlements and commemorating [Ukrainians] but let’s solve the bigger problem first,” the official added.

Veronika Melkozerova reported from Kyiv.