As it repels Russian aggression, Ukraine suddenly found itself at loggerheads with its western neighbour and strategic ally Poland. A quarrel morphing into systemic confrontation was caused by a significant shift in Ukraine’s memory policy, underway since former military intelligence (HUR) chief Kyrylo Budanov became Zelenskiy’s chief of staff.

Two events sparked outrage in Poland: the reburial of the WWII nationalist leader and Nazi collaborator Andriy Melnyk and the naming of a Ukrainian special forces unit after “UPA Heroes”. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was the military wing of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Melnyk led one of the rival factions inside the latter. 

The central issue in the historical dispute is the Volyn massacre, a systemic extermination of ethnic Poles who lived in Ukraine by UPA militants during WWII.

On June 19, Polish President Karol Nawrocki stripped his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskiy of the White Eagle order, an event that triggered an escalating exchange of hostile statements and performative actions on both sides of the emerging conflict. 

Many more major Polish politicians renounced their Ukrainian awards. Zelenskiy and numerous Ukrainian dignitaries responded in kind, returning their Polish orders to Poland.

Within a couple of weeks, both the hard-right Polish opposition and the members of its centre-right government began threatening to block Ukraine’s accession to the EU, unless it stops glorifying the UPA.

It goes without saying that WWII memories are alive in both countries and very close to heart for some the characters involved. Nawrocki, for example, was the head of the Polish Institute of Remembrance, and before that, the director of the WWII museum in Gdansk.

The two countries have long been on a collision course over their differing interpretations of WWII history, but why did the clash happen now, after four years of Russia’s all-out invasion?

Seeds of conflict

The snowballing confrontation may seem absurd to outsiders, but it is deeply rooted in both countries’ domestic politics and pertains to fundamental issues which most observers chose to ignore since the start of Russian aggression in Ukraine in 2014.

The largest of these elephants in the room is the fact that Poland would always be one of the largest obstacles on Ukraine’s path to the EU. This has very little to do with history: the main sticking point is agriculture. One of the world’s leading producers of cereals and oilseeds, Ukraine is just too much of a rival for Polish farmers.

Back in 2023, Robert Telus, who served as Polish agriculture minister at the time, said that Poland would not allow Ukraine to join the EU unless measures are put in place to restrict the entry of its agricultural products. He cited a full ban on the export and transit of Ukrainian grain, introduced by Poland earlier that year, as an example of these measures. In 2024, Polish farmers blocked the Ukrainian border for months on end to ensure there were no Ukrainian agricultural exports into the EU.

Today’s seemingly unrelated conflict over WWII history broke out right at the time when the EU formally opened the first cluster of accession talks with Ukraine. That subject rapidly popped up in the ensuing exchange of hostile statements.

First, the leader of Poland’s hard-right opposition, Jarosław Kaczyński, said that Poland should block the new clusters of Ukraine’s accession talks with the EU. Then, his rival from the current Polish government, Defence Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, said Poland would block Ukraine from joining the EU unless it stops glorifying the UPA and OUN.

After a few days, Kosiniak-Kamysz added fuel to the fire by saying that Poland would not supply Mig-29 fighter planes to Ukraine because the latter allegedly failed to share its drone technology with Poland.

It’s worth noting that Polish politicians have been closing their eyes on the glorification of the OUN and UPA in Ukraine since the Maidan revolution of 2013-14. In fact, none other than Kaczyński ended his address to Maidan revolutionaries in December 2013 with the famous OUN/UPA slogan “Glory to Ukraine!”. It happened at the early stage of the revolution, long before it started being widely used by Ukrainian politicians and the military. The same slogan was repeated hundreds of times by major Polish politicians.

The mass renaming of streets in Lviv and the rest of western Ukraine, former Polish territory known in Poland as Kresy Wschodnie, didn’t spark anything similar to the current outrage either.  

But the mood in Polish society over the four years of war in Ukraine has shifted from justified outrage with Russia’s actions and a good doze of jingoist fervour to serious Ukraine fatigue and disdain for Zelenskiy’s trademark cockiness.

Poland’s far-right opposition showed all the right political instincts when it started bashing Ukraine over its memory policies last month. Nawrocki’s popularity soared 54.4%, rising by 8.4 percentage points in a single month. The Russia-friendly far right Konfederacija party also gained popularity.

Uniting around the leader

The political rationale behind Ukraine’s eagerness to enter a petty-looking conflict with Poland, while facing brutal Russian aggression, is less obvious than that of Polish politicians. From the point of view of its Western backers, Ukraine has indeed reacted most counter-productively when instead of defusing the conflict, it doubled down on provoking it.

“No one will dictate us which heroes to honour,” Zelenskiy defiantly told the Poles. 

But like in Poland, the underlying reasons for this provocative behaviour may have little to do with WWII history.

Last autumn, Ukrainian anti-corruption agencies began unveiling the results of a massive anti-corruption investigation that focused on Zelenskiy’s immediate entourage. Charges were brought against the president’s closest allies, including — eventually — his chief of staff Andriy Yermak, who had to resign. Investigators stopped short of claiming that Zelenskiy was himself part of the corruption scheme.

The corruption scandal turned Zelenskiy into a lame duck who could be easily scapegoated when the war ends — with a result that will likely raise questions about his political decisions on its eve and during the first months when there was a real chance to end it before it got worse.

Zelenskiy replaced Yermak with Budanov, a powerful securocrat and a political leader in his own right — more a power-wielding ally guaranteeing physical protection than a genuine friend. Budanov brought with himself elements of the culture which reigns inside the military intelligence agency (HUR) which he headed for many years. Many of the special forces units he created under the auspices of the HUR stem from extremist groups, often linked to the far-right Azov Movement.

One of them is the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC) comprised of Russian neo-nazis. Some of its core members joined the Azov battalion at its conception in 2014 because they felt that post-Maidan Ukraine was closer to their ideals of white race revolution than Putin’s Russia.

The first signs of Budanov’s new WWII memory policy came earlier this year when Ukraine’s National WWII History Museum, located under one of Kyiv’s most prominent landmarks, the Soviet-era Motherland statue, opened an exhibition dedicated to RVC and curated by the unit’s chief ideological officer Aleksey Lyovkin, a lead singer in the NSBM (national-socialist black metal) group M8L8TH, which stands for Hitler’s Hammer. Lyovkin is believed to be one of the figures behind the Russo-Ukrainian Wotanjugend platform, which glorified Hitler and promoted white terrorism in the past. The exhibition’s decor was dominated by the fascist Spayka symbol, coined by Russian Nazi collaborators in the 1930s and adopted by RVC at its conception. 

The Ukrainian far right has visibly sensed the change of tack in the government’s attitude in recent months. The self-censorship, widely practised to avoid spooking Ukraine’s Western allies, is suddenly gone. Lyovkin is now back to glorifying the BORN, a murderous Russian neo-nazi gang that assassinated migrants and antifa figures. 

The ideological service of Ukraine 3rd Army Corps, controlled by the political leadership of the Azov movement, celebrated this week the anniversary of the proclamation of Ukraine’s independence by OUN leaders in 1941. That historical document stated that “the newly formed Ukrainian state will work closely with the National-Socialist Greater Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler which is forming a new order in Europe and the world”.

This burial of Andriy Melnyk, with Zelenskiy in attendance, made the ongoing shift in history policy more pronounced. As Zelenskiy said, Melnyk was meant to the be first historical personality whose remains would become a part of the pantheon of Ukraine’s national heroes. He said Yevhen Konovalets, a pre-WWII OUN leader, would become the next.

Budanov’s main political slogan today, popping up in almost each of his public statements, is national unity. “This is an important demonstration of unity and responsibility. Unity — because common memory unites society,” he wrote in the latest post dedicated to the national pantheon. 

WWII memory built around the OUN/UPA is of course totally manufactured. Only a tiny minority of Ukrainians, even in the country’s west, can claim ancestral links to UPA soldiers, while pretty much everyone had ancestors fighting the Nazis in the Soviet army. OUN/UPA is a cargo cult brought in by Ukrainian diasporas from North America. But that’s beyond the point for the former intelligence chief who is habitually engaged in crude cognitive warfare. 

Not coincidentally, national unity was also the slogan Russian President Vladimir Putin opted for during the turbulent times of the Chechen war at the start of his reign, hence the name of his party — United Russia. Unity has historically been authoritarians’ favourite buzzword. 

What “unity” means in practical terms in Ukraine today is protecting Zelenskiy’s monopoly on power underpinned by the constitutional majority in the parliament so as to ensure his immunity from either anti-corruption agencies or being scapegoated for the results of the war. 

Zelenskiy can achieve that by continuing the war without holding any elections for years or by holding a Russian-style managed elections that would guarantee his victory. Ukrainska Pravda reported this week that Zelenskiy had met his main political rival, former commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny, trying to persuade him not to take part in elections that could be held as early as next autumn, despite the ongoing war. Zaluzhny reportedly refused.

What the entire trend smacks of is the good old authoritarianism of the same kind that reigns in the neighbouring Russia. OUN’s legacy comes in handy because while being explicitly anti-Russian, the organisation propagated authoritarianism and totalitarianism, as well as the voluntaristic rule of self-appointed militant leaders. 

EU membership is not really a part of that agenda. If you look at what the Azov movement’s ideologists were saying about European integration over years, you’ll realise that their views are remarkably similar to those of Vladimir Putin — that it is a decadent liberal structure which favours immigration and sexual perversity. Instead, they tended to support the idea of Intermarium, a union of East European states spanning from the Baltic to the Black Sea and confronting both the decaying West and imperialist Russia. 

But putting ideology aside, there is a growing feeling that EU dreams may dissipate once the war is over, perhaps because it has always been just a bait that lured Ukrainians into a conflict with Russia. This explains why Zelenskiy was so aggressively agitating for fast-track membership before the war ends. He was explicitly told by European leaders that it was not an option. He might be looking for other ways now.