This is not the time for a historical spat between Poland and Ukraine.
Russia has relaunched its aggressive imperialism. Both Polish and Ukrainian sovereignty and security are under threat – Ukraine experiencing direct invasion. The fate of Europe is connected.
Today’s alliance between the two nations isn’t ceremonial. Ukrainian defense runs on Polish logistics and intelligence sharing. Polish security depends on Ukrainian resistance keeping Russian forces away from NATO’s eastern flank.
So, it’s hardly the time to reopen old historical wounds.
The past should be left to historians, not exploited by politicians. Both Polish and Ukrainian leaders need to display wisdom, tact, and restraint. Historical grievances from decades past cannot be allowed to overshadow what’s at stake right now.
Yet that’s exactly what’s happening. The Volyn (Volhynia in Polish) massacres of 1943 – in what had been eastern Poland, inhabited mostly by Ukrainians, but at the time under Nazi occupation, with Soviet partisans being parachuted in and complicating matters even more – deserve rigorous historical examination.
Questions about casualty figures, causes, classification? All legitimate. But politicians are weaponizing these questions for contemporary political purposes, threatening the alliance at a crucial juncture.
The scholarly progress that politicians are now reversing
Here’s the thing: the model for handling Volhynia already exists. And it was working.
Over the past decade, Polish and Ukrainian historians built collaborative frameworks that nationalist politicians never could. Joint research teams gained access to archives in Warsaw, Kyiv, and beyond. They cross-referenced burial records, demographic data, witness testimonies. International conferences brought scholars from both nations together – spaces where evidence could be examined without nationalist pressure to reach predetermined conclusions.
This work produced a nuanced understanding: the recognition of systematic violence against Polish civilians and vice versa; the acknowledgment of Ukrainian grievances under interwar Polish policies; and the documentation of how Nazi occupation and Soviet partisans created conditions for ethnic conflict.
Now it seems politicians are dismantling what historians built. This is the regression both sides must resist.
The political cost of weaponizing history
The damage is already visible. Poland’s designation of July 11 as the National Day of Remembrance for Victims of Genocide by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) creates diplomatic friction. Ukraine’s honoring of the UPA or resistance leaders like Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych? Poland reads these as provocations.
Government statements about historical terminology become tests of alliance loyalty, straining the working relationships between defense ministries, intelligence services, military commands – the relationships that operational cooperation requires.
Polish demands for Ukrainian renunciation of UPA commemoration, and Ukrainian dismissals of Polish accusations as nationalist manipulation, erode trust. And Moscow’s information operations actively amplify Polish-Ukrainian historical disputes, knowing perfectly well that alliance fractures serve Russian strategic interests.
Historical ignorance enables political exploitation
The general public in both Poland and Ukraine knows relatively little about their common history, Ukrainians about what happened in Volhynia, and Poles about why most Ukrainians did not lament the destruction of the Polish state by the Nazis and Soviets in 1939.
Politicians exploit this gap, playing on myths and emotions because most citizens lack the context to evaluate political claims critically. In Poland, Volhynia gets presented as if it were a standalone atrocity – an inexplicable eruption of mass violence from the Ukrainians disconnected from broader circumstances. Ukrainians are shocked that the Poles vilify the UPA, which they associate almost exclusively with the anti-Soviet resistance it waged into the 1950s.
But Volhynia was not the beginning of Polish-Ukrainian antagonism. It was the tragic result of what came before and a stage in what was to follow.
Understanding this causation isn’t granting moral absolution – it’s essential context, not justification.
With no disrespect meant to the Polish side, there are things that Poles attacking Ukraine’s behavior in the past should consider before presenting their narratives in black and white terms, and which the Polish public should be made aware of.
The interwar period poisoned relations before the war began. After Poland regained independence in 1918, a significant Ukrainian population – around 5 to 6 million people, Poland’s, and Europe’s, largest interwar national minority – found itself within Polish eastern borders. Those in Eastern Galicia fought and lost a war for independence in 1918-19.
The Polish government subsequently failed to honor the international obligations it had accepted as a condition of its recognition as an independent state by the victorious Allied powers, including autonomy for Eastern Galicia.
The ultra-nationalist ideology that shaped Polish policy toward its minorities was elaborated by Roman Dmowski – by any standards, a chauvinist. His statue still stands in Warsaw today. Dmowski’s vision emphasized ethnic Polish nationalism – a program of Polonization of the national minorities (Ukrainians, Belarusians, Jews, Lithuanians) through repressive assimilation that would define interwar policy.
Polish land policies systematically favored Polish settlers in traditionally Ukrainian territories. The government sponsored colonization programs that brought ethnic Poles into eastern regions, displacing Ukrainian farmers, consolidating Polish control. Ukrainian language was restricted in schools and public administration. Cultural institutions faced systematic obstacles. Political representation was limited through electoral manipulation and administrative barriers. And political prisoners were kept in the notorious Bereza Kartuska prison.
A brutal “pacification” of troublesome regions in 1930 sparked international condemnation.
The Manchester Guardian reported on Oct. 14, 1930:
“The Polish terror in the Ukraine [the Polish, not Soviet, ruled part] is now worse than anything that is happening anywhere else in Europe... The Ukraine has become a land of despair and desolation that is all the more poignant because the rights of the Ukraine have been guaranteed by international treaty, because the League [of Nations] has been altogether deaf to appeal arguments, and because the outside world does not know or does not care.”
The following day, the New York Herald-Tribune’s European correspondent John Elliot reiterated this.
Such policies radicalized the younger Ukrainian generation and some of them – like Bandera and Shukhevych – resorted to terrorism against Polish officials. They witnessed Poland’s signing of a non-aggression pact with the USSR in the year following the 1933 Holodomor in neighboring Soviet-ruled Ukraine, and its participation, along with Germany in the 1938 dismemberments of Czechoslovakia. Then, in the following months, Poland’s cooperation with Hungary to prevent the Ukrainians from establishing a small Piedmont-like independent state in the eastern Transcarpathian region of Czechoslovakia.
By 1939, even the moderate Ukrainian forces had given up any hope of “normalizing” relations with the Polish state. The state of the Ukrainian minority in Poland after two decades of Polish rule, was described by the British historian and journalist Elizabeth Wiskemann in an article for Nation published on Feb. 25, 1939, as follows:
“The condition of the Sudeten Germans under Czechoslovak rule was a paradise compared with that of the six or seven million Ukrainians who live in Poland. Poland is a pseudo-dictatorship. All officials and police in the Polish-Ukraine are Polish, and Polish settlers have been settled in Ukrainian areas. Polonization is the price of all political or social advancement. The old pre-war demand for a Ukrainian university at Lwow (Lviv) has been consistently ignored, and ordinary schools are either bilingual, or – as in the majority of cases, conducted only in Polish.”
Consequently, few Ukrainian tears were shed in September 1939 when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded and carved up Poland.
The UPA emerged in 1942, following the German invasion of the USSR, initially to oppose German deportation of Ukrainian youth to Germany for forced labor and then to counter the dual threat of Soviet return or the restoration of Poland, whose nationalist forces intended to retain the territories claimed by Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Lithuanians.
Having justified its actions in 1943 as preemptive self-defense on behalf of the Ukrainian population, the UPA is accused of carrying out systematic mass violence against Polish civilians in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia – killings that Polish sources estimate at between 50,000 and 100,000. Polish self-defense units and the Polish underground, including units of the Armia Krajowa (Home Army), Poland’s main resistance organization, also allegedly committed atrocities against Ukrainian civilians, according to Ukrainian sources.
There is no doubt that these horrific crimes of ethnic cleansing occurred and need to be properly acknowledged – and that understanding what led to them is not an attempt to justify them or to invite approval of the proportionality of guilt.
The mass violence that erupted in the Volhynia massacres resulted from converging pressures: interwar grievances that had built up over two decades, German occupation policies that deliberately weaponized ethnic divisions, Soviet atrocities that traumatized both communities, and populations caught between occupying powers while seeking to build rival futures. This is said to foster understanding, not to deny or excuse.
As we know, the active Polish-Ukrainian ethnic conflict within Poland’s former borders was not resolved through reconciliation but by Soviet force and demographic engineering. Stalin reorganized Soviet borders, incorporating Western Ukraine into Soviet Ukraine. Poland’s borders were shifted westwards, compensated by German territories.
In 1947, Operation Vistula (Akcja Wisła) forcibly deported over 140,000 Ukrainians from the east of postwar Poland to the west. Centuries-old antagonism and wartime atrocities were “resolved” through displacement and territorial reorganization, leaving both communities victimized by the outcome.
This is why Volhynia is now a historical and political dispute rather than an ongoing ethnic conflict: the demographic and territorial struggle that created it was ended by force, not by understanding.
This context is what historians working in archives are examining. Politicians obscure this when they reduce complex causation to simple narratives of victimhood and villainy.
Recommendations
Both governments should commit to a clear working compromise:
During the active phase of Russian aggression, deprioritize Volhynia memory politics. Official government statements, diplomatic demands, and parliamentary resolutions about 80-year-old events are counterproductive while the alliance faces an immediate threat.
Allow professional historians to continue their work without interference. Fund archival research, support international scholarly collaboration, allow exhumations at sites where atrocities are believed to have occurred, and protect historians’ freedom to reach evidence-based conclusions – even when those conclusions complicate national narratives.
Recognize that one nation’s hero or liberation force may be another’s detested former enemy.
In short: leave Volhynia to the historians. Focus on the war that matters now.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily of Kyiv Post.