Poles Chide Warsaw for Cozying Up With Kiev as WWII Massacre Anniversary Nears

Warsaw has been at the forefront of supporting the West’s efforts to integrate Ukraine into NATO and the European Union after the 2014 coup in Kiev. Ordinary Poles have expressed mixed feelings, however, citing post-coup Ukrainian governments' glorification of a fascist militia which murdered hundreds of thousands of Poles during WWII.

Polish President Andrzej Duda’s choice of words in comments about the need to avoid stirring up a painful historical spat with Ukraine have sparked outrage in Poland.

"We are conducting a peaceful policy, not a policy of running with pitchforks. A policy of calmly seeking agreement on historically difficult matters which are many decades old, very complicated, and extremely painful for many of our compatriots," Duda said in interview on Friday after visiting Kiev earlier in the week to meet with President Zelensky.

“These are very difficult issues and the last thing we want is some kind of attempt to incite hatred between nations,” Duda added, confirming that he would not be asking for an apology from Kiev ahead of the upcoming 80th anniversary of the Volhynia massacres of Poles by a Ukrainian fascist militia during the Second World War.

The remarks were met with a sharp rebuke from prominent Poles, including former prime minister Leszek Miller, who suggested that Duda "does not want to remember the Ukrainians who ran with pitchforks and used them to murder Poles, especially women and children."

Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski, a well-known Polish-Armenian Roman Catholic priest who has spent much of his life seeking justice for Volhynia's victims, including his family members, called Duda's comments "shameful," saying the president "promised the families of the victims of genocide a decent burial and did nothing for eight years."

"As for pitchforks, it is the UPA,* which is worshiped in Ukraine, that once impaled Polish children on pitchforks," the priest added, using the Ukrainian-language acronym for the Ukrainian Insurgent Army – a fascist militia which killed up to 200,000 Polish civilians in western Ukraine between 1943 and 1945, and also targeted anti-fascist Ukrainians, Russians, Jews and Red Army soldiers.

The UPA’s brutality has been well documented, with militia members known to have traveled from village to village to eliminate undesirables, burning down entire settlements and using knives and axes against victims to save bullets.

In an interview with Polish media on Friday, Isakowicz-Zaleski accused President Duda "and his dear friend Zelensky" of waiting for the generation of Poles who remember the Volhynia massacres to “die out” and for “people to forget about it.”

"By accusing the families of genocide victims of 'running with pitchforks', Andzej Duda apparently doesn't want to remember what his peasant ancestors did. He also doesn't want to remember that he owes his presidency mainly to Polish peasants and their descendants, not those who murdered and humiliated them," he added.

President Duda called out Isakowicz-Zaleski over his criticism of Polish government policy on the issue, saying he would prefer for the priest "not to deal with politics, but do what a priest should do."

Between 100,000 and 400,000 Ukrainians are estimated to have fought in the UPA's ranks during WWII, a drop in the bucket compared to the six million who served in the Red Army and hundreds of thousands engaged in anti-fascist partisan operations in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. In contemporary Ukraine, the UPA has been lionized as heroes, with monuments to their leaders erected in some cities, streets renamed in their honor, textbooks whitewashing their crimes, and a march commemorating UPA leader Stepan Bandera’s birth carried out in Kiev every year.

Ultranationalists inspired by the UPA played a major role in the February 2014 coup, and volunteered en masse to join Kiev's operations to try to crush Donbass people’s militias formed in the spring of that year to resist the new authorities' anti-Russian crackdown.

* Recognized as an extremist organization and banned in Russia since 2014