Ukraine criticises proposed law banning promotion of Ukrainian nationalist ideology in Poland

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Ukraine’s embassy in Poland has published a statement criticising a bill proposed by Polish President Karol Nawrocki that would criminalise the promotion of ideologies associated with Second World War Ukrainian nationalist groups.

It condemned the proposed law for equating those ideologies with Nazism and communism and warned that, if the bill is passed, Ukraine “will be forced to take retaliatory measures”. However, Nawrocki’s spokesman has responded by defending the bill and criticising the Ukrainian statement.

The episode marks the latest flashpoint in long-standing tensions between Poland and Ukraine – two otherwise close allies – over wartime history, and in particular the massacre of around 100,000 ethnic Poles by Ukrainian nationalists.

On Monday this week, Nawrocki submitted a bill that would, among other things, expand Poland’s current law that makes “promotion of a Nazi, communist, fascist or other totalitarian system” a criminal offence with a potential prison sentence of up to three years.

The president’s legislation would add to the list of prohibited ideologies those promulgated by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the faction of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists led by historical nationalist leader Stepan Bandera, known as OUN-B.

The UPA and OUN-B were two interlinked Ukrainian nationalist organisations that fought for their country’s independence during World War Two. Parts of the OUN-B collaborated with Nazi Germany during the war. The UPA was involved in massacres of ethnic Poles and Jews.

In Poland, those events, known as the Volhynia massacres, have been officially recognised as an act of genocide. However, Ukraine rejects the use of that term. It also still venerates many UPA and OUN figures as national heroes, prompting criticism from Poland and Israel.

Poland’s national-conservative opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party in December last year proposed a law banning the glorification of “Banderites”. The issue was then taken up by newly elected, PiS-aligned president Nawrocki, who said last month:

In order to eliminate Russian propaganda and establish Polish-Ukrainian relations based on real partnership, mutual respect and mutual sensitivity, I believe we should include a clear slogan in the law, “stop Banderism”, and equate Banderite symbols in the penal code with symbols that correspond to German Nazism and Soviet Communism.

However, that position was strongly contested on Wednesday by a joint statement signed by 40 Ukrainian historians and published by the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINM), a state body, then shared by the Ukrainian embassy in Warsaw.

They expressed “concern” at the idea of legally equating the UPA and the OUN-B with Nazism and communism and the fact that “the initiators of these changes unilaterally blame Ukrainians for all events related to the Volhynia tragedy”. They called for those behind the proposed law to “avoid politicising the issue”.

“Given Russia’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine and the entire civilised international community, we consider as unacceptable actions that weaken Ukraine, and thus Poland, precisely because this constitutes the strategic goal of the Russian aggressor, who for centuries has done everything to destroy both Ukrainians and Poles.”

The signatories claimed that historians are still “working to create an objective picture of all the circumstances, not only of the crimes committed against the Ukrainian and Polish populations in Volhynia and Galicia, but also of the causes that led to such a bitter conflict”.

They suggested that it remains unclear what was “the influence of special units of the occupation regimes of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany on the events that led to this Ukrainian-Polish clash”. The group also called the UPA and OUN-B “anti-imperial, national liberationist” groups.

Their remarks reflect the common historical narrative in Ukraine regarding those groups and their actions, emphasising that they must be placed in the broader context of the war.

Leading international scholars, however, regard the massacres led by the UPA as acts of ethnic cleansing intended to remove Poles, Jews and other non-Ukrainian groups.

In their statement, the Ukrainian historians warned that, if Nawrocki’s bill is adopted, “the Ukrainian side will also be forced to take retaliatory measures”.

This would include “adopting appropriate legislation regarding the actions of certain units of the [Polish] Home Army and Peasant Battalions, which, as is known, committed crimes against the Ukrainian civilian population during World War Two and in the immediate postwar years”.

They said that such an escalation would “serve the interests of the Russian side” and “we appeal to our Polish colleagues to exercise the utmost caution” and to engage in “objective, professional and impartial dialogue”.

In response to the statement, Nawrocki’s spokesman, Rafał Leśkiewicz, told Polsat News that it is in fact the Ukrainian criticism of the proposed law that is “implementing a scenario written in the Kremlin, i.e. triggering another crisis in the historical sphere between Poles and Ukrainians”.

“This law is needed precisely to combat Russian disinformation and attempts to divide Poles and Ukrainians,” said Leśkiewicz, adding that Banderism “was a criminal ideology” and should be treated “the same as Nazism or communism”.

He also argued that it is completely unjustified to equate the Volhynia massacres, in which he said around 120,000 Poles were murdered, with “retaliatory actions” by the Home Army that resulted in the deaths of “perhaps a thousand Ukrainians”.

The Volhynia massacres have long been a source of tension between Ukraine and Poland. However recent years have seen a number of steps towards reconciliation. In a symbolic moment, the Ukrainian president and his Polish counterpart jointly commemorated the 80th anniversary of the massacres in 2023.

In January this year, a diplomatic breakthrough on the issue of exhuming wartime victims paved the way for Poland to begin exhuming massacre victims in Ukraine and Ukraine to begin exhuming the remains of UPA fighters in Poland.

However, tensions still regularly flare. Earlier this year, Ukraine condemned Poland’s decision to create a new national day of remembrance for “victims of genocide committed by the OUN-UPA”.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: ВО Свобода/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY 3.0)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.