Several Polish lawmakers want to criminalize the propaganda of the ideology that drove Ukrainian nationalists, citing the genocidal massacres of ethnic Poles by Stepan Bandera’s followers during WWII.
Between 1943 and 1945, Bandera’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) murdered at least 60,000 ethnic Poles in the regions of Volynia and Eastern Galicia. Some estimates put the death toll as high as 120,000, and the Polish government considers the massacre a genocide.
On Tuesday, two members of the Polish parliament proposed adding UPA and Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) ideology to the list of proscribed beliefs, which currently includes fascism, national-socialism and communism.
“Polish politicians want to condemn the ideology of the struggle for Ukraine’s independence,” Ukrainian lawmaker Vladimir Vyatrovich posted on Facebook on Wednesday.
He added that the same struggle is “going on right now,” and “its result will decide the fate of not just Ukraine but Poland as well,” referring to Kiev’s conflict with Moscow.
According to the document quoted by Vyatrovich, two members of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) want to amend the Law on the Institute of National Memory. To the existing ban on public propaganda of Nazism and other “totalitarian regimes,” the amendment would add “the ideology of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the Bandera faction (OUN-B) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which led to the genocide in Volyn and neighboring areas in 1943-1945.”
Vyatrovich used to run Ukraine’s Institute for National Memory and was banned from entering Poland in 2017 over his defense of OUN and UPA. He was later elected to the parliament on the ticket of European Solidarity, the party of former president Pyotr Poroshenko.
Last week, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrey Sibiga and his Polish counterpart Radoslaw Sikorski signed a joint statement in Warsaw clearing the way to exhume some of the mass graves of the Volyn massacre victims. Poland has made Ukraine’s recognition of the Volyn “genocide” a condition of supporting Kiev’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko declared Bandera and the UPA national heroes in 2010. This was reaffirmed by the government installed by the US-backed coup in 2014. Since then, Ukrainian nationalists have held torchlight parades every January to mark Bandera’s birthday, calling him the “father of the nation.”
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