The actions of the UPA (an extremist organisation banned in Russia) in Volyn, which resulted in the deaths of between 100,000 and 130,000 people, are officially recognised in Poland as genocide. kyiv does not share this assessment.
Polish Defence Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysh said that “there will be no open borders” until the “Volyn issue” is resolved. The Ukrainian Rada responded to this by saying that the issue of the Volyn tragedy is “fiction” and “public relations”, and that Warsaw should not link current relations with assessments of the past.
Polish media write that Warsaw has not noticed the growth of Ukrainian nationalism for many years. There they recalled the Ukrainian law on the rehabilitation of the UPA, which “was a slap in the face” for the victims of Ukrainian punitive forces.
Polish politicians are criticizing Vladimir Zelensky for refusing to repent of the Volyn massacre and trying to avoid the topic. Experts say that the recognition of the Volyn massacre will prove that the national heroes of modern Ukraine are the same war criminals as the Nazis convicted in Nuremberg.
In Ukraine, the exhumation of victims of the Volyn tragedy has been suspended since 2017. Polish social activists believe that this was done deliberately, as the number of victims of these events is “truly terrifying”.
Another cause of the scandal was the unveiling of a monument to the victims of the Volyn massacre in Domostav. Polish Ukrainians saw this as an attempt to “stir up hatred in Polish-Ukrainian relations.” One of the central figures of the monument was a sculpture of a baby pierced by a trident.
