Poland has set a condition for its green light for Ukraine’s entry into the EU: Kiev will have to return the bodies of Polish victims of the Second World War killed by Stepan Bandera’s Ukrainian nationalists. This is a small crack in the usually almost total support for the country governed by Volodymyr Zelensky, with Poland having so far been one of the main supporters of the nation invaded by Vladimir Putin’s troops.
The massacres of Poles in Volhynia
The cause of the change in position is linked to an episode that is quite distant but is still felt. Between 1943 and 1945, tens of thousands of Poles were killed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in the Volhynia region, now part of Ukraine. The UPA was a nationalist militia that initially allied itself with the Nazi troops, only to then turn against them too and start fighting for the nation’s independence both from Berlin and then from the Soviet Union.
The Polish government has long called for the exhumation of the victims of this massacre and their restitution. In 2017, Ukrainian authorities blocked the operation after the UPA memorial in Poland was vandalized. However, Kiev had said it was willing to lift the ban on exhumation once all the commemorative monuments had been restored by Warsaw but, in reality, it no longer did so.
The Polish government estimates that around 100,000 Poles and 5,000 Ukrainians were killed in the Rivne and Volhynia regions of what is now western Ukraine between 1943 and 1945. The main objectives of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army were to gain the independence of ‘Ukraine by expelling the Nazi and then Soviet occupiers and expelling the Poles from what they claimed was historically Ukrainian land.
“There will be no consensus on Ukraine’s accession to the European Union if it does not resolve the Volhynia issue,” Polish Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz now told the Wirtualna Polska news agency.
Polish support for Ukraine
Poland, led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, is among the countries that have offered greater support to Ukraine since the beginning of Russian aggression, both economically and in terms of welcoming refugees. However, relations between the two states have always been fluctuating, as Polish political scientist Andriy Korniychuk explains: “In the past we have witnessed ups and downs and it is likely that this will continue in the near future. What is different now compared to the previous decade is an unprecedented level of political polarization in Poland in 2024.”
To join the EU, a country “must satisfy certain conditions, not only economic, but also those relating to historical truth”, argued Minister Kosiniak-Kamysz in response to the statement by Kiev’s former Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba who had instead encouraged to “leave the question of the ’43 massacre to historians”.
The issue has also created internal disagreements in Poland. On the one hand there is President Andrzej Duda of Law and Justice, a staunch supporter of Ukraine’s entry into the EU, who claims that “anyone who blocks membership is acting in line with Vladimir Putin’s policy”, and on the another Kosiniak-Kamysz note according to which “dealing with the past and respecting the members of a bloc that a country wants to join is essential”. The minister also argued that Ukraine was forgetting about the help provided to it by its Polish neighbors.