An Unhealed Wound

Word to the wise: don’t ever tick off one of your most important allies— especially when you are the President of Ukraine

For anyone who does not know me well or has only just begun his or her journey through this newsletter, one region on this planet that has long occupied a special place in my heart more than anywhere else: Central and Eastern Europe. For centuries, we here in the West, both in North America and Western Europe, have dismissed this space, situated on the crossroads between Germany, Russia, and the Middle East as little more than a black hole of underdevelopment, conflict, shifting borders, and primitive, superstitious inhabitants. Indeed, because of this unfortunate geography between predatory imperial powers like the Austrian Hapsburgs, Ottoman Turks, and Russian Romanovs menacing from all around, on top of undefined ethnic boundaries, conflict and foreign occupation have been the norm, not the exception for the nations inhabiting what was essentially a giant buffer zone.

As for this author, while I may no longer be exclusively concentrated on Eastern Europe, there is something truly magical about that corner of the world that always captivates me.

As we powered into the 20^th century, when television and air travel fundamentally enhanced our capacity to discover exotic cultures, Eastern Europe remained an enigma in the American psyche as Josef Stalin trapped nations like Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia behind the Iron Curtain. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, our popular imagination still effectively wrote these people off as corrupt gangsters, minor economic actors, or at best, a source of cheap labor. However, in the last decade or so, Central and Eastern Europe has been the venue of a profound transformation, not only economic but geopolitical. Recently, Poland, the region’s largest economy, was upgraded by S&P Global Ratings from the status of an emerging market to a developed market. While a monumental achievement for a nation that only emerged from communism in the last four decades, it is Poland’s strategic location, as the most powerful neighbor on the immediate western frontier of the nearly five-year catastrophe in Ukraine, that deserves our attention today.

And with this newfound prestige, Poland has the leverage to break some once-unthinkable taboos.

Back in May, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a familiar presence on this newsletter, raised eyebrows when he awarded one of Ukraine’s special forces unit the title Heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). To a casual observer of Ukraine here in North America, such an honor is little more than a performative gesture to inspire patriotism by employing the name of a World War Two-era militia who fought the Red Army for Ukraine’s independence. However, in that corner of the world, such gestures are never casual or performative. To any Pole, however, such a designation is anything but harmless— it is an assault on Polish historical memory. And this is where we encounter some Eastern European history—history almost entirely unfamiliar to us here in the West but foundational to both the Polish and Ukrainian psyches.

During the bloody chaos of the Eastern Front of World War Two, Ukrainian partisans of the UPA launched a systematic and brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in the territory of Volhynia, a region annexed by Poland after World War One but whose population remained primarily Ukrainian. The goal of the UPA and its leader Stepan Bandera, a hard-line Ukrainian nationalist with fiercely anti-Polish and antisemitic beliefs, was the complete independence of Ukraine from all traces of foreign influence or ethnic minorities. Having been imprisoned from 1934 to 1939 by Polish authorities for a years-long campaign of terrorism, Bandera attempted in 1941 to make an alliance with Nazi Germany, only to discover that, to no one’s surprise, the Nazis nevertheless deemed him a Slavic Untermensch and threw him in a concentration camp. Having somehow survived the war, Bandera lived out the rest of his days in hiding before being assassinated by the KGB in 1959 in Munich.

As Bandera himself was away, the men he inspired unleashed what is now deemed a genocide of approximately 100,000 Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia between 1943 and 1945, including 8,000 Poles on the day of July 11, 1943 alone. And the UPA’s methods were nothing short of unchained barbarism. Some Polish families were locked inside homes, barns, and churches and burned alive. Other families were slaughtered with crude tools such as scythes, axes, and machetes. Pregnant women and their fetuses were chopped to pieces. Even priests were literally crucified on church doors. Remains were dumped into mass graves without the dignity of a Christian burial. After two years of horror, the UPA had accomplished its job and erased any trace of Polish settlement in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia as both regions were promptly annexed by the Soviet Union.

Yet, despite this sadistic savagery, Stepan Bandera and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army have been revered as a national hero and martyr by millions of Ukrainians, particularly in Western Ukraine, the heartland of Ukrainian partisan activity. This so-called “cult of Bandera” has intensified since the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. To Poland, Zelensky’s honoring of Bandera and the UPA, in the words of a Polish friend of mine, “felt like a slap in the face.” Despite all the “immense support from the Polish government for Ukraine—the transfer of weaponry to the funding and maintenance of Starlink systems, fundraising campaigns and drives for specific supplies were organized, shipments were sent to the border, and volunteers across every corner of Poland mobilized aid for refugees," Zelensky still chose to cross an unthinkable red line.

Though we cannot forget Ukraine’s perspective as well. From a nation fighting an existential war, I understand that diplomatic sensitivities with an ally who cannot afford to allow Ukraine to fail will never sit at the peak of Kyiv’s list of priorities. To any patriotic Ukrainian, the UPA was not a terrorist organization, but a band of freedom fighters who fought a guerilla campaign for Ukrainian independence from the Soviet Union that drug on well into the 1950s. In the Ukrainian psyche, to disown the UPA would be like asking an American to disown George Washington’s Continental Army. And Zelensky himself defended his designation, insisting that the soldiers themselves, who view the current war as a continuum of centuries of conflict with Moscow, demanded nothing less. In his own words, Zelensky was just acceding to their wishes, likely without the expectation that Poland would react so harshly.

None of Zelensky’s justifications matter to Warsaw. When Polish President Karol Nawrocki opted to strip Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state decoration, 59% of Poles approved of this decision. In Polish society, as my friends there can attest, the damage to Zelensky and Ukraine’s reputation is likely irreparable. And there have been real-world consequences for Kyiv. In the words of Polish Defense Minister Wladislaw Kosniak-Kamysz, “With Bandera, Ukraine will not join the European Union.” Thus, so long as Ukraine continues to pour salt on a historical Polish wound, Poland will ensure will never join the European Union. According to a 91-year-old survivor of the massacre interviewed by The Wall Street Journal in September, “the Ukrainians hope that time will pas and everyone will forget, but we cannot forget this.”

I know you may find this particular episode in global politics a bit far removed from your daily news intake. After all, the dispute is entirely a bilateral one between Poland and Ukraine, with only marginal direct relevance to the interests of the United States of America. And even I would agree that the United States government has no business commenting on, let alone mediating, a strictly bilateral diplomatic quarrel halfway around the world. We merely can hope that both nations are mature enough to find common ground and healing through this undoubtedly tragic episode of history. But when The Journal published the aforementioned article explaining this dispute for an American audience, I felt justified that this matter I have followed closely for years was relevant enough to deserve our attention.

Stepping back to the broader picture, I suspect that it has long been the unofficial policy of the U.S. government to view small-to-mid-sized nations in Central and Eastern Europe through the prism of great-power politics vis a vis the Soviet Union and now the Russian Federation. Instead of acknowledging that each of these nations between Germany and Russia are proud, unique sovereign states with distinct traditions, historical memory, and even conflicts with each other, our government and media lazily group all of them into a cluster of pawns against Moscow. That is why we often lose sight of the most sensitive disputes, such as Volodymyr Zelensky’s refusal to acknowledge deep Polish pain regarding the atrocities committed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. While Zelensky’s miscalculation may have scored some political points at home, it would be most wise of the Ukrainian president to stop provoking one of his most critical allies.