Ukraine’s Transformation Into An Anti-Polish State Wasn’t Inevitable

There were several pivotal moments in history when Ukrainian nationalism could have become something altogether different than it is today with its state glorification of fascist OUN-UPA war criminals.

It was recently assessed that “Ukraine Is Now Indisputably An Anti-Polish State” after Zelensky glorified the Volhynia Genocide’s culprits at the state level, which prompted his Polish counterpart Karol Nawrocki to announce that he’ll seek to revoke the Order of the White Eagle from him, Poland’s highest honor. This wasn’t inevitable since Ukraine could have become a state that was neutral towards Poland, if not friendly, but its post-communist identity-building project was hijacked by OUN-UPA activists.

Their extreme nationalist views, which declared the goal of an ethnically pure Ukraine and sought to achieve it through the genocide of Poles, remained part of the conversation about Ukrainian identity for nearly the past century. They represented the culmination of the prior genocides that Ukrainians committed against Poles in the mid-17^th century during Khmelnitsky’s Uprising and the mid-18^th century during the “Koliszczyzna”. Even then, however, everything still could have been very different.

Poland’s victory over the “West Ukrainian People’s Republic” and consequent absorption of it right after World War I, which comprised territories that were integral to the formation of Polish Civilization but were considered by Ukrainians to the cradle of their nationalist movement, did indeed upset Ukrainians. Nevertheless, Marshal Józef Piłsudski later allied with leader of the “Ukrainian People’s Republic” Symon Petliura against the Bolsheviks in pursuit of restoring the latter’s polity, but they ultimately failed.

From the popular Polish perspective, a lot of Polish blood was spilled for this cause, which was aimed at advancing Piłsudski’s Intermarium vision of a regional confederation of anti-Soviet states. Despite the Bolsheviks and particularly the Russians with which they were associated being their shared enemies, not enough Ukrainians rallied behind this joint endeavor, the reason of which remains a subject of debate. Their failed wartime alliance, however, could have helped build a new Ukrainian nationalism.

Instead, it became popular among Ukrainians to blame Poles for their defeat, which coupled with a few (arguably, as some see it, misguided) linguistic and religious curtailments during the interwar period aimed at fostering the assimilation of minorities to predispose some Ukrainians to hate Poles. This was then exploited by what became the German-backed OUN, which Berlin employed as a proxy force against Warsaw during their decade-long tensions that ended with their 1934 Non-Aggression Pact.

German patronage of the OUN, and the Austrians’ support of Ukrainian nationalism for over a century before that as a means of dividing-and-ruling its part of the Polish Partitions, are therefore responsible for fueling the most extreme manifestations of Ukrainian nationalism and weaponizing them against Poles. This makes their strain of Ukrainian nationalism a partially foreign-directed one that took advantage of Ukrainians’ socio-cultural differences and historical disputes with Poles.

Thus, contrary to popular Ukrainian perceptions, the OUN-UPA and their forefathers from the time of the partitions onward weren’t “anti-imperialists”, they were the Germanics’ geopolitical tools for dividing two Slavic peoples who largely lived in harmony in the same state for centuries barring several extreme conflicts. To be sure, the situation in the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland and the Second Polish Republic could have been better for some of those who eventually came to describe themselves as Ukrainians.

Nevertheless, most Ukrainians’ historical memory of those periods as “dark ages” is a gross exaggeration for justifying the two genocides that they committed against Poles (and also Jews) prior to the Partitions as well as the OUN’s terrorist-separatist insurgency during the interwar period. Instead of focusing on the positives from their centuries together in a single state, they gave in to the temptation to obsess over the negatives, which fuels what has regrettably become Ukrainian culture’s victimization complex.

Contrary to what some observers might expect, it was actually directed towards Poland before it was directed towards Russia, the latter of which Ukrainian nationalists consider to be “Muscovy” in order to differentiate what eventually became their somewhat separate identities in the centuries since the Mongols destroyed “Old (‘Kievan’) Rus”. Ironically, despite contemporary Ukrainians’ hatred of Russia, it was none other than Russia which encouraged their hatred of Poland back then.

Likewise, despite the hatred of Poland that they then came to have, it was Poland that later encouraged their hatred of Russia. Russia took advantage of the Ukrainians’ linguistic and religious differences vis-à-vis Poles while Poland took advantage of their different historical and political experiences vis-à-vis Russia. In both cases, Ukraine – which means “borderland” – and its people remained an object of competition between Russia and Poland, which have now been rivals for slightly over a millennium.

The difference between Russia’s and Poland’s instrumentalization of Ukrainians’ “negative nationalism” against the other and what the Germanics later did to pit them against Poles is that the first two sought regional leadership as a Slavic superpower while the last one sought Ukraine’s vast resource wealth. In a sense, one can say that Russia and Poland kept their respective use of the Ukrainians’ cause “within the Slavic family”, while the Germanics wanted to divide-and-rule the Slavs through these means.

Be that as it may, Russia’s and Poland’s abovementioned policies left little lasting effect since it was the Germanics’ (Austria’s and then Germany’s) own such policies after the Partitions and during the interwar period that’s the most relevant to the contemporary day. Also of relevance is how Ukrainian nationalists remember the Ukrainian-Bolshevik/Soviet War, the famine known by them as the Holodomor, the Great Terror, World War II, and the post-war period, all of which was influenced by the German-backed OUN.

It was precisely this enduring influence by that German-backed group whose ideological origins were previously influenced by the Austrians, thus debunking the notion of them being “anti-imperialists”, that resulted in the ultimate victory of anti-Polish Ukrainian nationalism. After the USSR’s dissolution, this strain competed with others for two decades, but then it dealt its rivals a coup de grace by mobilizing the masses during the Western-backed “EuroMaidan” Color Revolution coup in 2014.

The Polish State played a role in those events and refused to condemn the illegal seizure of power by forces that were openly inspired by the OUN-UPA, after which the new authorities passed a law one year later allowing for the glorification of those groups’ historical figures. Misguided by the fallacy that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, the Polish State seemingly believed that this could be weaponized against Russia, yet the fact is that the OUN-UPA killed many more Polish civilians than Red Army soldiers.

By that point, Ukraine had already informally become an anti-Polish state, but there was one last chance to force it into reversing course. Poland could have made its military aid to Ukraine after the start of large-scale hostilities with Russia in 2022 conditional on Ukraine finally allowing the exhumation and proper reburial of the Volhynia Genocide victims’ remains, official recognition of that war crime, and banning the glorification of its culprits. The Polish State didn’t, however, and the rest is history.

In place of glorifying the OUN-UPA, Ukrainian nationalism could have been redirected with Poland’s guidance into glorifying the “Ukrainian People’s Army” associated with its namesake self-declared republic that jointly fought the Bolsheviks with Poland a century prior. Petliura was responsible for the killing of 50,000 Jews so he’d still be a controversial “hero” for them in the eyes of the global public, but from the Polish one, he and his army would be much better “heroes” than the OUN-UPA.

The Cossacks’ involvement in many of Poland’s wars with Russia could also have been emphasized to appeal to an even broader geographic range of Ukrainians whose historical experiences were different than those of their western brethren. Most importantly, Ukraine’s hypothetical Polish-influenced decision to ban the glorification of the OUN-UPA would have undermined Russia’s argument that Ukraine was becoming a fascist state, but Poland passed up this opportunity for inexplicable reasons.

Ukraine’s cause wouldn’t have been anywhere as tainted as it now is due to its association with fascist war criminals and it’s possible that the conflict might have had an even greater chance of ending that spring since Russia’s denazification goal would have been achieved. Alas, that ship has long sailed, and it was at that moment that Ukraine’s transformation into an anti-Polish state was inevitable. It’ll likely remain one for years too after the conflict ends even if a “reformist” government follows Zelensky’s.