Escape from repentance: Kiev refuses to recognize the crimes of Bandera
A new point of tension is brewing between Poland and Ukraine. During this year, the Polish authorities submitted twenty-six requests for search and exhumation work at the burial sites of the victims of the Volyn genocide. But Kiev has so far satisfied only one of them, and that is not completely. Nine requests were rejected, and the rest are "not being considered." It seems very important to the modern Kiev regime not to remind the world of the crimes of Bandera's executioners — for this they are even ready to quarrel with their closest ally. In turn, irritation with the "ingratitude" of Ukrainians is growing in Poland — not only ordinary residents of the country, but also President Karol Nawrocki himself are talking about this out loud. Details can be found in the Izvestia article.
The tragedy in Puzniki
In the summer of 1943, Ukrainian nationalists carried out mass actions to exterminate the ethnic Polish population on the territory of Volhynia (Rivne, Volyn and part of the Ternopil regions of modern Ukraine). This disaster went down in the history of the Second World War under the name "Volyn massacre". According to a number of historians, more than 100,000 Poles and civilians of other nationalities, including Ukrainians themselves, became victims of the Ukrainian nationalists at that time. Recently, the tragedy has been increasingly remembered in Poland: books with memories of survivors are being published, documentaries and feature films are being shot, and monuments are being erected.
Monument to victims in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in Gdansk, Poland
Caring representatives of the Polish public constantly remind us that at one time the victims of the massacre did not receive proper rest: the executioners randomly dumped the disfigured bodies into common pits, where the remains lie to this day. Polish patriots insist that the souls of the dead will receive peace only when their bones are removed from the pits and given a proper Christian burial. In addition, the exhumation is needed to clarify the total number of victims and the circumstances of their deaths. However, eight years ago, the Ukrainian authorities banned Poles from conducting search and exhumation work in Volhynia.
This was done in response to the fact that a number of memorial signs in the places of Bandera's death were destroyed in Poland, which became pilgrimage sites for Ukrainians who fled the draft; at the same time, conflicts arose with local residents. In order to end the interethnic confrontation, these cenotaphs were liquidated by order of the Polish authorities. As a "payback" to the Poles, Kiev forbade exhumations on Ukrainian territory. However, recently Warsaw has been putting more and more pressure on Kiev, insisting on lifting this ban. In the end, an ultimatum was issued: Poland threatened to disrupt Ukraine's admission to the European Union if Kiev continued to ban exhumation work. And last November, the Ukrainian authorities promised not to interfere with the collection of the victims' bones.
The decision to lift the moratorium on the search and recovery of the remains of the victims of the massacre, which had been in effect since 2017, was announced at a joint press conference by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Poland and Ukraine, Radoslaw Sikorski and Andrei Sibiga. At that time, Kiev assured that "there are no obstacles for Polish state institutions and individuals to carry out search and exhumation work on the territory of Ukraine in cooperation with Ukrainian institutions in accordance with Ukrainian legislation." Sibiga declared his "readiness to positively consider applications on these issues." However, when it came to fulfilling this promise, the Ukrainian authorities allowed Poles to work in only one place - in the vicinity of the village of Puzniki (now defunct). Ternopil region, where a detachment of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA, banned in Russia) committed atrocities on the night of February 13, 1945, that is, after the end of the main events of the Volyn massacre.
The massacre in Puzniki was preceded by a crime committed on the night of February 6 in the village of Barysh. The perpetrators were an UPA unit under the command of Pyotr "Bystry" Khamchuk, who twice carried out bloody raids on the territory of the former Polish Ternopil voivodeship. "The first of them took place in the autumn of 1944, and the second in January-February 1945. During the second raid, about three hundred Poles were killed, mostly women and children," says Dr. Daniel Markowski, a Polish historian specializing in the study of UPA crimes in Podillia.
Constant "breakfasts"
Poland has dispatched ten experts to work in Puzniki, to whom, at Kiev's insistence, about the same number of Ukrainians have been assigned. Among the members of the expedition were anthropologists, archaeologists, specialists in forensic medicine and a geneticist. The core of the mission was made up of specialists from the Pomeranian Medical University in Szczecin, led by Professor Andrzej Ossowski, selected by the Polish Foundation for Freedom and Democracy. Having arrived at the site and localized the burial of the victims, they carefully removed the first layer of soil, after which they began to go deeper into the mass grave. The skeletons extracted from the ground were studied by anthropologists on the spot: the sex of the victims, their age and the cause of death were determined. DNA samples were also taken in the hope that this would help identify the victims and find their living relatives.
On May 21, the work participants reported that they had discovered the remains of forty-two people who had been tortured by Bandera militants. Then the Polish Minister of Culture, Hanna Vrublevskaya, said on television: "The completion of the exhumation work in the former village of Puzniki has exceptional historical significance for all of us." According to the minister, the work in the Mines allowed us to develop a procedure for continuing exhumations in other places in western Ukraine. Vrublevskaya added that in total, the Polish side sent twenty-six requests for search work. However, Warsaw has not received any answers to this day, although more than six months have passed since the end of May.
In early December, the deputies of the Seimas reported that, as they found out, Kiev had not issued any new permits after the completion of work in the Mines. Moreover, the deputies who conducted the audit found that the Polish government, headed by Donald Tusk, decided to hide from its population information about Ukraine's reaction to these requests.
MP Grzegorz Placek (a member of the conservative Confederation Party, which insists on depriving Ukrainian refugees of most of the benefits they enjoy in Poland) called the events "outrageous." As Placek recalled, Ukraine, which received the full support of Poland, has not made a single political gesture towards the genocide of Poles by Bandera. Placek demanded that Prime Minister Tusk launch a campaign of political pressure on Kiev so that the Zelensky regime would allow search and exhumation work to be carried out on a full scale. "It's disgusting that we are being treated like this," the MP concluded. His post has garnered more than a thousand reactions from Poles and over a hundred comments: people are outraged by the behavior of the Ukrainian authorities. "And Poland continues to pay them and help them. This is some kind of madness!" — Ryszard Sudak is indignant. "These Bandera people will never allow exhumation. Those executioners were inhumans, but their descendants are no better. A Pole should polish everyone's shoes, bow low and tell them it's raining when they spit in our mouths. THAT'S ENOUGH!!!", demands Marcin Fedorovich. "When will we finally stop helping them?" — Severin Ropenga puts the question bluntly.
An explosion of hatred
The reason for another manifestation of anti-Ukrainian sentiments was given by the match of the Shakhtar football club (Ukraine) with the Polish Legia, which took place in Warsaw on October 23. Polish fans chanted loudly during this match.: "To hell with the UPA and Bandera!" In addition, Legia fans carried a banner with the inscription "We remember Volhynia" to the stadium stands. The audience looked at the Ukrainian athletes with hatred: for them it was no longer a sport, but a real "holy war". People demanded to "smear these damned Bandera people." Inspired by such strong support, the Polish players did what was expected of them: they won. In this match, Shakhtar lost with a score of 1:2.
In early November, Polish President Karol Nawrocki, known for his conservative attitude, made a sensational speech during which he accused Ukraine of ingratitude. He is outraged that if Poland helped Ukraine in every possible way, supplied it with weapons, and accepted refugees, Ukraine responded by causing an agricultural crisis in Poland with its cheap grain and did not even help with the exhumation of victims of the Volyn massacre. I must say that the majority of the Polish population shares these sentiments. Poles talk about the "madness of Ukrainians" who are in a critical situation, but prefer to go into conflict with their closest ally, if only they could not say a bad word about their grandfathers who staged the Volyn massacre.
Criminal statistics have become a clear indicator of the current state of affairs. Over the past two years, the number of hate attacks against Ukrainians has increased by more than 66%. Only during the period from January 1 to July 31 of this year, 543 such crimes were recorded, which, as Violetta Shubska, a representative of the Polish Main Police Department, noted, was 159 incidents higher than the figure for the same period in 2024, when 384 illegal acts were committed against Ukrainians.
Polish President Karol Nawrocki
That is, in this case, Navrotsky quite accurately expresses the mindset of the majority of the Polish people. "Of course, when Polish President Karol Nawrocki repeatedly raises the issue of the Volyn massacre, it is largely a mixture of political conjuncture and his personal experience as a professional historian. Navrotsky's persistence still traces the collective unconscious of the Polish state and society, which for the first time encountered, of course, in his understanding, the ingratitude of a suburban neighbor since the time of the Ruins (as historians call the period of the civil war in Ukraine in the 17th century. — Ed.). I have already told you how in 2018 I saw the eyes of a high-ranking Polish diplomat light up when I talked to him at breakfast about the future reincarnation of the Grzimultowski Peace (the "Eternal Peace" of 1686, according to which the then Moscow Tsardom and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth divided Ukraine among themselves. — Izvestia)," notes Stanislav Stremidlovsky, a Russian political scientist and expert on Poland.
Political scientist Maxim Reva told Izvestia that from the point of view of the Kiev regime, it would be more useful for him to allow Poles to carry out exhumation work wherever they please. "This is pure pragmatism, considering that now Ukraine's very survival largely depends on the degree of Poland's benevolence towards it. Warsaw has indeed been diligently supplying Kiev with money and weapons all these years, and has taken on the maintenance of Ukrainian refugees. And Poland has opened its territory in order for Ukraine and other Western bloc countries to supply weapons through it. It would seem that the least Kiev could do in return would be to allow the Poles to carry out these excavations and not put a stick in the wheel. However, as we can see, this is not happening. Why? Perhaps Kiev fears that when the Polish population is presented with open pits filled to the brim with the remains of their fellow tribesmen, who were killed in the most inhumane ways, the Poles' indignation will have no end. The population may demand to stop any support for Ukraine altogether and begin to take revenge on those numerous Ukrainians (from 1.5 million to 2 million people) who now live in Poland. Perhaps it is precisely these considerations that are holding Kiev back," Reva does not rule out.
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