Shortly before Russia re-invaded Ukraine more than four years ago, I went to Mariupol to get a sense of what the response would be and met Ruslan Pustovoit, call sign \u201cSpider,\u201d who was organizing a volunteer defense force for the Ukrainian city. He kept a copy of a World War II Nazi SS officer\u2019s hat on his wall.<\/p>\n
Talking to Spider it soon became clear that if he had any politics or ideology at all, it was anarchy. A self-confessed former mob enforcer and ex-con, he\u2019d spent the previous eight years fighting, often behind enemy lines, earning military honors and more than 60 pieces of shrapnel to dislodge from his body. The hat was a middle finger directed at the Russians, who were forever calling Ukrainians fascists. In context, it made a kind of sense, but it was dumb. It fed a stereotype useful only to Ukraine\u2019s enemies.<\/p>\n
The same can be said of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy\u2019s decision last month to rename a special forces unit after the controversial World War II Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA. That attempt to connect today\u2019s war with those fighters of more than 80 years ago has sparked a bitter dispute with his Polish peer.<\/p>\n
President Karol Nawrocki is a right-wing populist from Poland\u2019s Justice and Law party, which appears to have settled on voter fatigue with the perceived costs of the war next door, including more than 1 million Ukrainian refugees, as a wedge issue to regain control of the parliament and government. This is also among the reasons for which Law and Justice has campaigned against allowing Ukraine \u2014 a major potential competitor to Polish agricultural exports \u2014 swift membership of the European Union.<\/p>\n
Zelenskyy knows this, which is why it was also less than smart to add fuel to Nawrocki\u2019s flames. The dispute has snowballed since, with Nawrocki stripping Zelenskyy of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland\u2019s highest honor, and Ukraine\u2019s president on June 20 posting an image of the medal as he mailed it back to Poland. The post got 173,000 likes and other officials and politicians in Kyiv sent their Polish medals back, too. This is reckless statecraft at the service of domestic politics on both sides \u2014 only Poland isn\u2019t at war.<\/p>\n
Ukraine does have more work to do in acknowledging and making amends for the so-called Volhynia massacre, in which the UPA slaughtered tens of thousands of Polish villagers in a clear attempt at ethnic cleansing, mostly in 1943. Warsaw considers this a genocide, with credible death toll estimates hitting 60,000. But even more important than acknowledging the historical record is that Ukraine cannot afford to make an enemy of modern Poland.<\/p>\n
The UPA, led by Stepan Bandera, was a military wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, a radical nationalist group aimed at promoting Ukraine\u2019s independence. The UPA fought the Soviets and the German occupation, but then also collaborated with the Nazis. The Volhynia killings were aimed at ensuring that the provinces of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia would remain part of Ukraine after the war and they were particularly brutal. Women and children weren\u2019t spared.<\/p>\n
As the Yale University historian Timothy Snyder recently told Polish media, the context here is important: Ukraine is four and a half years into a war for national survival against troops from Russia, with echoes of World War II and other, previous efforts to escape Moscow\u2019s yoke.<\/p>\n
Russian President Vladimir Putin, together with his officials and media propagandists, calls all Ukrainians Banderites (after Bandera) and has made the country\u2019s \u201cde-Nazification\u201d a core aim and justification of his war. It\u2019s partly in response to those accusations that \u2014 like Spider and his SS officer hat \u2014 Zelenskyy and many other Ukrainians now choose to embrace the UPA in ways they would not have done before the war. They focus on its record of fighting for independence and ignore its indisputable dark side, including for some UPA personnel the killing of Jews.<\/p>\n
But the other important context is that Zelenskyy heads a state that relies almost entirely on Poland for its survival in today\u2019s war. That isn\u2019t primarily because of anything Warsaw gives to Ukraine: It\u2019s because Poland provides Kyiv with the only reliable and sufficient transit route for arms, goods and people. And, like every other EU member state, Poland also exercises a veto over Ukraine\u2019s future accession to the bloc.<\/p>\n
Poland\u2019s Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Nawrocki\u2019s political rival, has emerged as the only apparent adult in this dispute, pointing out that its only winner will be Putin. The irony here is that Russia is the foe both nations fear most, today and for most of their modern history. Moscow, first as the center of the Russian Empire and then of the Soviet Union, has partitioned Poland and swallowed Ukraine. This is what drove Poland\u2019s deeply supportive initial response to the war, led by Nawrocki\u2019s Law and Justice predecessor as president, Andrzej Duda. It was he who handed medals to all those Ukrainians.<\/p>\n
Nawrocki is cynically weaponizing the UPA issue to promote the kind of ethno-nationalist debate that will mobilize Law and Justice\u2019s political base ahead of parliamentary elections next year and corner the pro-European Tusk into appearing unpatriotic. Zelenskyy, perhaps made rash by Ukraine\u2019s recent run of better news from the front, and with his own nationalist beast to feed, has fallen into the trap.<\/p>\n
Ukraine has a complex past with fascism to deal with, as do most countries of central and eastern Europe, and it should start with a full accounting of the UPA\u2019s checkered history. It doesn\u2019t matter that Zelenskyy is Jewish or that Kyiv is about to hold its biggest ever Pride event or that Ukraine is clearly not a fascist state. It also doesn\u2019t matter that Polish nationalists did indeed plan to integrate Volhynia and Eastern Galicia into Poland after the war or that Polish troops committed their own atrocities against Ukrainians amid the population swaps that followed. The slaughter of civilians can never be justified.<\/p>\n
Countries at war tend toward jingoism and the mythologizing or sanitizing of their national histories. This is a normal, if regrettable, response. Ukraine, however, cannot afford to indulge in gestures that will so obviously alienate an essential ally. Zelenskyy needs to do whatever it takes to defuse this dispute.<\/p>\n
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shortly before Russia re-invaded Ukraine more than four years ago, I went to Mariupol to get a sense…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10468,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[839,31,844,4953,56,25,6,26,851,4534,152],"class_list":["post-10467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-donald-tusk","tag-european-union","tag-karol-nawrocki","tag-law-and-justice","tag-poland","tag-russia","tag-russia-ukraine-war","tag-ukraine","tag-upa","tag-volhynia-massacre","tag-volodymyr-zelenskyy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10467\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}