While Ukrainian public opinion was divided over President Zelensky’s decision to bestow the honorary title ‘Heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)’ on a military unit, Polish President Karol Nawrocki’s decision to strip the Ukrainian president of Poland’s highest state decoration drew near-unanimous condemnation in Ukraine. A war for national survival is hardly the right moment for Ukrainians to explain all the complexities of their troubled history, or for Poles to undermine their country’s vital support in the struggle against Russian aggression.
Several days ago, the body of a Ukrainian teenager was found in the Vistula river near Warsaw. No signs of violence were found, according to Polish officials. The boy was apparently overtaken by the treacherous water flow. There was little that was out of the ordinary about the event since hundreds of people in Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere on the globe become recurrently victims of nature’s might and their own weakness or recklessness. What was rather exceptional in this case (and several similar others) was a very peculiar agitation in social media on both the Ukrainian and Polish sides (the languages are close enough to facilitate a bilingual debate but not necessarily mutual understanding).
Two opposite narratives transpire quite clearly from the comments, – so clearly and intensely, that they leave little doubt as to the involvement of Russian trolls in the increasingly provocative conversation. In most similar cases, they do not try to clarify whatsoever but, rather, to muddle the water, stir up hatred and deepen mistrust. From the Ukrainian side, they imply that the Polish authorities hide the truth and cover the criminals. From the Polish side, they merely smear and curse. Any news about a dead or beaten Ukrainian is met with gloating, cheering, and malicious rejoice: “Serves him right!”, “They should f*** off”, “Let all of them go over there!”.
Yet surprisingly, the Google watchdogs, which are pretty vigilant on the Ukrainian web about alleged or real insults to Russia and Russians, pay little attention to the blossoming of anti-Ukrainian hate speech in Poland – a likely sign that this kind of xenophobic discourse became normalized and largely acceptable in Polish society. The seemingly marginal case of a drowned Ukrainian boy and the ugly debate around it illustrates a deep crises of Polish-Ukrainian relations not only in the top corridors of power but also, regretfully, at the grass-root level. The problem here is not just with large swaths of Polish society that share, to various degrees, xenophobic views but also with the healthier part of society that keeps a low profile vis-à-vis the aggressive Ukrainophobes, while the liberal government fails to strictly apply legal measures against rampant hate speech. Difficult to imagine, indeed, such an unchecked rhetoric against any group, Jews in particular, in any democratic society.
The latest symbolical gestures of both Ukrainian and Polish political leaders apparently contributed to further deterioration of Polish-Ukrainian relations and deepened the chasm between a mutual misperception of a common past and today’s developments in both societies. The crisis was triggered by Volodymyr Zelensky’s decree on May 26 that granted the honorary name Heroes of the UPA to a special forces unit of the Ukrainian army and was broadly condemned in Poland as political provocation, as an attack on Polish collective memory, identity and sense of victimhood.
Grim shadows of Volhynia
The UPA, Ukrainian Partisan Army, was created in 1943 in Western Ukraine by the pre-war clandestine Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists with the declared goal of fighting all the occupants of Ukrainian land, primarily Soviets and Germans, and of using the inevitable post-war turmoil and presumed power vacuum for the much-dreamed-of creation of an independent Ukrainian state. The end of WWII was imagined more or less like that of WWI – when Ukrainian nationalists proclaimed, in 1918, an independent West Ukrainian National Republic on the ruins of the Habsburg Empire but lost ultimately to much stronger and better prepared Poles.
This historical trauma and false analogy between WWI and WWII largely determined their eventual policies and miscalculations. On the one hand, they refused to recognize the legitimacy of Polish power in the West Ukrainian lands, especially after the Poles reneged on the promise to grant Ukrainians autonomy in their newly-established (or re-established, as they contended) state. On the other hand, the most radical factions put their bets on the ‘integral’ (totalitarian) version of nationalism, quite popular at the time in Europe, and sought opportunistic alliances with the post-WWI revisionist powers able to challenge the international order and open for Ukrainians a window of opportunity for independent state building.
In 1929, the veterans of the 1918-1920 national liberation wars in both Central and Western Ukraine set up the clandestine Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) that soon engaged in all kinds of acts of sabotage and terror against the Polish state. This only worsened the plight of the Ukrainian minority as the Polish government became even more discriminatory and repressive. In 1944, deep Polish-Ukrainian animosity culminated in the UPA-led ethnic cleansing of the Polish population in the West Ukrainian region of Volhynia. It resulted in the killings of about 80,000 Polish civilians as they predictably refused to leave the territory upon the UPA ultimatum, but the conflict also took also a significant toll on the Ukrainian side as about 30,000 civilians of Ukrainian ethnicity were also murdered in the so-called retaliatory (quite often ‘preemptive retaliatory’) actions by the Polish underground Home Army and Self-defense units.
The whole story is well-known to specialists but not to the general public who have been fed systemically, for decades, with one-sided nationalistic representations of the historic tragedy. Little surprise that the heavily demonized UPA and all its leaders are seen as the deadly enemies of the Polish nation, often comparable in public discourse and imagination with German Nazis. No matter that the UPA relations with German authorities (unlike those of the pre-war OUN) were unambiguously hostile and confrontational: in 1941, Germans actually arrested all the nationalist leaders and either killed or sent them (including their notorious leader Stepan Bandera) to concentration camps.
The Ukrainian view of the OUN and, especially, of the UPA, is substantially different. Having little appetite, even during the war, for dictatorship and authoritarianism, and increasingly distancing themselves from UPA’s anti-Polish ‘excesses’ in Wolyn, Ukrainians nonetheless praise the UPA’s struggle with both Germans and Soviets as example of patriotic resistance, self-sacrifice, and unwavering commitment to the national cause. They agree that war crimes should be condemned and criminals punished but this should relate to specific units, commanders and perpetrators, and not to the whole underground army and national resistance movement. Such a nuanced and contextualized view of the UPA evolved gradually in Ukraine, clashing with the dominant Soviet demonization of ‘Ukrainian nationalism’ similar to the one that prevails in Poland.
It was actually the 2014 Russian invasion and especially the 2022 all-out war that made the UPA narrative of national resistance and patriotic self-sacrifice highly topical all over Ukraine, far beyond the ‘nationalistic’ western regions. The UPA symbols and names of its leaders – so hated by Moscow – initially spread to Central Ukraine and, gradually, to the heavily Russified Southeast. The decision by the Ukrainian president to give the name ‘Heroes of the UPA’ to the elite army unit was certainly not his initiative and probably not a reflection of a personal admiration for the UPA (of which he, as most East Ukrainians, knows little besides the Soviet venomous propaganda completely discredited nowadays); rather, it was his compliant response to the bottom-up request from the military unit itself. The problem, however, is that the Ukrainian heroic myth of UPA clashes dramatically with the demonic myth of the same UPA developed in Poland. In both countries, the myths are instrumentalized politically: in Ukraine – for the sake of mobilization against the external (Russian) enemy, while in Poland the goal is to mobilize the loyal electorate against the domestic (liberal and cosmopolitan) rivals.
Profiting on nationalism
Karol Nawrocki, who won last year presidential elections largely with the support of far-right and ultranationalist voters, seems to be well-aware of the power of this instrument. This is probably why he reacted to Zelensky’s faux pas so aggressively: he did not just condemn his unfortunate decision but threatened to revoke the order endowed to Zelensky by his predecessor. And since Zelensky predictably did not give in to the unscrupulous blackmail, Nawrocki had little choice but to execute his threat. This further increased the temperature of the rift, prompting Zelensky to send the order back to his Polish counterpart by regular mail and inciting many other Ukrainian officials (including three former Ukrainian presidents, no friends of Zelensky’s) to follow suit and strip themselves of Polish regalia.
While Ukrainian public opinion was rather divided about Zelensky’s decision to name the military unit after the ‘UPA heroes,’ citing both Polish concerns and war-time pragmatism as arguments for their doubt, Nawrocki’s decision led to almost unanimous condemnation on the Ukrainian side. The move was quite reasonably perceived as an insult not merely to Zelensky but to all Ukrainians whose heroism and self-sacrifice had been symbolically epitomized in that unfortunate medal. The spat seemed to escalate further as Volodymyr Zelensky changed his traditional port of departure for international trips from Polish Rzeszow to Moldovan Chisinau and skipped a highly important Ukraine Recovery Conference in Gdansk on June 25-26, authorizing instead the prime minister Yulia Svyrydenko to head the Ukrainian delegation, and submitted the law on the Ukrainian National Pantheon to parliament, stating boldly that “the names of all the heroes who have fought for Ukraine and inspired Ukraine in various centuries and eras will be united and forever enshrined in our history with a capital letter, with great respect and attention from the state: Ukraine, which has self-respect, values its people, and defends what is its own – its right to be Ukrainian. Where no one will ever dictate how we live, how we speak, who we love, who we should be grateful to, or which heroes we should honour” (italics mine, M.R).
Nawrocki’s office responded immediately, further raising the stakes: “Has Ukrainian society ever considered whether its kleptocratic elites actually want to join the European Union?” – tweeted on X the head of Nawrocki’s international desk, Marcin Przydacz. “Or maybe it is easier,” he mused acerbically in the style of Maria Zakharova or Dmitri Medvedev, “to steal while the waters are murky—luring people with the promise of a pro-Western course while simultaneously shifting the blame for the lack of progress in negotiations onto everyone else? It is, of course, easier to provoke and stir up historical tensions [!] so as not to have to account for the lack of reforms, the lack of an effective fight against corruption, the lack of real de-oligarchization, the lack of real improvements for entrepreneurs, the lack of the rule of law, the lack of infrastructure improvements, and the lack of many other things that these elites have failed to deliver over the past three decades… Do they really want to [join the EU], or are they just feeding lies and deceiving their own voters, who are growing increasingly disillusioned with such a government?.”
EU officials, so far, have refrained from interfering in this ‘diplomatic’ exchange, while the Kremlin spitefully glees and cheers, more or less in the same way as its trolls celebrate the row on the web. So far only the Polish prime minister and minister of foreign affairs (political opponents of Nawrocki) have dared to make their voices heard and called for restraint, reminding everyone that there is a war and that all similar conflicts play into Moscow’s hands. The call was well received in Ukrainian society that still maintains a positive attitude toward Poles and Poland but it is not yet clear whether Ukrainian politicians will listen to experts and intellectuals and tame their provocative gestures and rhetoric.
It is even less clear whether this will have any impact on the Polish president whose entire political career – starting from his controversial accession to the leadership of the WWII Museum in Gdansk and directorship of the notorious Institute of National Memory up to his electoral victory last year with strong support from far-right nationalists and neo-fascists – was built on narcissist chauvinism, confrontational rhetoric, and well-calibrated Ukrainophobia. He is more likely to follow the path that has already brought him success against liberal rivals, – and infect Polish society with intolerance, xenophobia, and historical resentment.
Moral objections aside, such a policy clearly pays off. The latest opinion poll shows an 8.4% increase in the president’s popularity (from 46.8 to 54,8%) after its slow but steady decline since he assumed his position. The result does not yet guarantee him and his party victory in next year’s parliamentary elections but clearly proves that nationalism still is an effective instrument of political mobilization. His moderate rivals who refrained from anti-Ukrainian accusations, performed much worse in the same opinion poll. Only 38% of respondents said they trust Prime Minister Donald Tusk (vs. 58%), and 43% (vs. 52%) declared trust in Radoslav Sikorski. The results are hardly surprising since Poles, according to another opinion survey, overwhelmingly (62% vs. 19%) blame Volodymyr Zelensky rather than Karol Nawrocki for the current crisis.
UMCS Professor Slawomir Lukasewicz raises an interesting question about the timing of Nawrocki’s attack: why he launched it exactly now, in May-June, even though there were several other suitable moments to play the ‘anti-Banderite’ card. In January this year, Volodymyr Zelensky named another unit of the national armed forces, the 190th Training Center of the Unmanned Systems, after Vasyl Kuk, the last UPA commander-in-chief. In March, the government approved the construction of the Nation Pantheon, and eventually organized there the reburial of Andriy Melnyk, the leader of the rival OUN faction who died in 1964 in Luxemburg. Volodymyr Zelensky, who took part in the official ceremony, emphasized the “historical continuity” between the UPA and today’s Ukrainian armed forces who “heroically” fight the same enemy. He also announced the eventual reburial of Yevhen Konovalets, the founder and leader (since 1929) of the OUN, murdered in Rotterdam in 1929 by a Soviet agent. None of this, however, stirred agitation in Warsaw, and only in May did Karol Nawrocki mention Zelensky’s misstep.
He may just have noticed the decline of his ratings and decided to boost them ahead of next year’s parliamentary elections with the familiar tool of Ukraine/UPA bashing, as Professor Lukasewicz implies; but there could also be a problem with the wording: the names of Kuk, Melnyk, or Konovalets do not mean much to the average Pole without an explanation, while the ‘UPA’ works like a red flag and, being conflated with the word ‘heroes’ (rather than bandits, devils, and criminals), badly challenges the myth of the UPA as a primordial evil.
In any case, it is very unlikely that this type of populist politician will be satisfied with any Ukrainian concessions short of full and unconditional acceptance of the Polish version of common history – something that is far beyond Zelensky’s reach and, even in Poland itself, is not fully achievable. What Ukrainians really can do in this difficult situation is not to appease the Polish president (to no avail, anyway) but try not to give him any additional cards in his fight with domestic ‘enemies’ – the incumbent liberal government headed by Donald Tusk and his moderate and responsible foreign minister, Radoslav Sikorski. The sad truth is that liberals who appeal to people’s minds and civility often lose free elections to radicals who appeal to the crowd’s emotions and basic instincts. The new far right coalition that may come to power in Poland next year might be much more disastrous for Ukraine than Nawrocki himself.
First things first
Zelensky may lack experience but he has a good intuition and seems to learn fast. At least, after last year’s scandal with Trump and Vance in the Oval Office and his expulsion from the White House, he recognized promptly and properly that solidarity, justice, international law, and democratic values simply do not exist in Trump’s universe, and therefore it makes no sense to evoke them and rely on them. He learnt how to behave with Trump and maybe will learn how to behave with Nawrocki – even though the task might be more difficult because Nawrocki is not merely narcissistic but also ideologically driven and, worst of all, Ukraine (i.e. demonic, primordial, essentialized ‘Ukrainian nationalism’) seems to be a focal point of his peculiar witch-hunt ideology.
It would be advisable for Ukrainian officials to distance themselves from a highly complex, convoluted, and controversial history of the UPA, leaving its study to historians, its alleged crimes to lawyers, and its celebration/commemoration to local communities, preferably non-state actors. This should be done for both normative and practical reasons. In normative terms, celebrating the UPA does not suit us ideologically nowadays. Nor does it fit our notion of acceptable political practices. Its unconditional, wholesale heroizing and whitewashing is as false and wrong as its wholesale demonizing and bashing. There are too many complexities and nuances that require detailed explanation, clarification, and contextualization; even Ukrainians may not fully grasp it, let alone foreign nationals who, at best, know nothing about Ukraine but more often ‘heard something’ that boils down to Russian propaganda spam and Western Orientalizing clichés.
In practical terms, Ukrainians have neither the time nor the resources to fight all the stereotypes and explain all the complexities and nuances that most people do not know and, usually, are not very eager to learn. Life with stereotypes is comfortable, learning is tiresome, and questioning of common wisdom is painstaking. This is an uphill battle that impoverished, bleeding Ukraine cannot fight. Ukrainians have a clear priority – to survive the genocidal war that Russia wages against them as a nation. Survival means, among other things, not to waste scarce resources on things of secondary importance and on problems currently unsolvable. In this deadly fight, Ukrainians strongly depend on their friends and partners. They should not alienate them by either real or imaginary disrespect. First things first, and all other things afterward, after war.
Editor’s note
Pavel Sudoplatov, who had a distinguished career in the KGB under Stalin, was involved in masterminding the 1933 famine and died peacefully in his bed in 1996.
Mykola Ryabchuk is a research director at the Institute of Political and Nationality Studies of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and a lecturer at the George Washington University. He has written extensively on civil society, nation-state building, national identity, and post-communist transition. One of his books has been translated into French: De la 'Petite-Russie' à l'Ukraine, published in Paris by L'Harmattan in 2003.