Recovery of Ukraine will be discussed in Poland between Kyiv-Warsaw | News of the Russian-Ukrainian war

Kyiv, Ukraine – Ukraine’s president, prime minister, parliament speaker, senior ministers and diplomats stand in sympathy at a military cemetery outside Kyiv on May 22 as soldiers carry the coffins of Andriy Melnyk and his wife Sofiya past them.

The ceremony was about “honoring Ukrainian heroes”, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said of Melnyk, the leader of the Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) who wanted to create an independent Ukraine and who died in West Germany in 1964.

Four days after the reburial – the Melnyks’ ashes were removed from Luxembourg – Zelenskyy named the elite military unit after the “heroes of the Ukrainian armed forces,” a military unit known by its Ukrainian name, the UPA.

It came from the OUN, which fought in the Second World War and for many years resisted the Sovietization and Russification of the former Polish regions of western Ukraine.

Zelenskyy’s actions led to the condemnation of Polish President Karol Nawrocki in what escalated into a long-running conflict.

Since the full-scale invasion of Russia in 2022, Poland has been Kyiv’s backbone, providing arms and aid and sheltering millions of refugees.

On June 19, Nawrocki to undress Zelenskyy of Poland’s highest honor, the Order of the White Eagle, because the UPA “remains above all the groups responsible for the brutality of” Poles during the Second World War, Nawrocki said on TV.

In response, Kyrylo Budanov, the leader of the Zelenskyy administration, Foreign Minister Andriy Sibiha and former President Petro Poroshenko returned their awards to the Polish government.

But Anton Shekhotsov, an expert on European right-wing groups who lead the Vienna-Center for Democratic Integrity, told Al Jazeera that the conflict is unlikely to undermine Warsaw’s support for Kyiv as both countries see Russia as a serious, existential threat.

Most of what is now Poland was part of the tsarist empire for over a century, and after WWII, Warsaw became a pro-Soviet satellite.

“In the Kremlin, they will understand that such conflicts have no problem, which is Poland’s support for the war in Ukraine.”

However, Kremlin-backed media “participating in the anti-European war will try to use the UPA issue effectively to defuse tensions between the two countries,” he said.

On June 19, the Polish Prime Minister tried to defuse the conflict ahead of a meeting of Ukraine Recovery of Kyiv’s Western backers to be held in the northern Polish city of Gdansk, which starts on Thursday.

“The conflict between Poland and Ukraine pleases (Russian President Vladimir) Putin and surprises our allies,” Donald Tusk wrote on X. “The front line is elsewhere.”

Zelenskyy will skip the meeting as Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko leads the Kyiv delegation.

What was UPA?

The UPA’s exit was triggered by a number of factors, including Ukraine’s national aspirations, the conditions of World War II and the Holodomor, a man-made famine in the Soviet Union that killed millions of Ukrainians. The removal of religious leaders, believers and intellectuals, forced Russification and deportations of all races had an influence.

To some, UPA leaders made what they thought was a slightly worse choice and allied themselves with Nazi Germany, which defeated the Soviet Union in 1941 and occupied much of what is now Ukraine. The Nazis promised to end the plantations of unpopular people and restore religious freedom, but they did not want Ukraine to be independent.

Before they were disarmed, the UPA participated in the Nazi holocaust and killed thousands of ethnic minorities in western Ukraine, which was part of Poland, according to historians and survivors.

“They also killed everyone who tried to protect the Poles,” said Nadiya, a 95-year-old Ukrainian woman who lives in Volyn in western Ukraine and witnessed the killing of the Poles. he said Al Jazeera last year.

He was 12 years old when a group of youths affiliated with the UPA carrying axes, knives and guns entered his village in western Ukraine on July 11, 1943, a day that is still known as the Volyn Massacre in Poland.

Nadiya said she escaped rape and death because her father hid her in the grass.

He asked not to give his last name because he does not feel safe in Ukraine today, where the UPA is controlled, and the streets are named after its leaders.

Ukraine’s pro-Western leaders “denied, minimized or justified” the UPA’s role in the genocide, historian Ivan Katchanovski of the University of Ottawa wrote in 2019.

However, most of the members of the UPA “helped the Nazi leaders to carry out the genocide of the Jews, Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles by helping to kill many people,” he wrote.

The alliance of the UPA, especially its leader Stepan Bendera, caused a lot of confusion among the Ukrainian people.

Annual visits to commemorate Bandera’s birthday on January 1, 1909, have been regularly followed by angry letters from the ambassadors of Poland and Israel.

The tours are carried out by right-wing and nationalist groups whose members volunteered in groups to fight Moscow-backed separatists in the southeastern region of Donbas in 2014.

Since the unarmed and ill-trained Ukrainian army could not withstand the insurgents, their country’s armed forces played an important role in expelling them and reducing their “People’s Republics” to almost a third of the Donbas.

‘Radical Nationalists in Ukraine are cheap power’

Some observers cite their military strength as a key factor in Zelenskyy’s support for the UPA, despite the fact that his Jewish grandparents’ family was killed in the Holocaust.

“Ukrainian patriots are a free or very cheap army, and they recruit young people to go to the front with the help of a hero metaphor,” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher at the University of Bremen in Germany who has studied right-wing movements, told Al Jazeera.

“In addition, the (nationalist) forces made a better attack than the Ukrainian army,” he said.

Meanwhile, right-wing intellectuals are taking the lead in “educating” Ukraine’s political culture and controlling the elections of Zelenskyy’s party, he said.

The ongoing war with Russia reinforces the popular narrative about everyone who fought for Ukraine’s independence, one expert said.

“In the midst of Ukraine’s struggle for independence (from Russia), anyone who takes part in the struggle and sees independence as a benefit easily connects with those who fought for independence in the past,” Vyacheslav Likhachev, an expert on Ukrainian and Russian ultra-nationalists, told Al Jazeera.

“Everything else is of little importance for a better understanding of history and the government’s policy of remembering things,” he said.

“Of all the enemies of the UPA, only one issue – the one we are fighting now, the Moscow Empire – recognized by the Soviet Union then and Russia now,” he said.