There is a particular sadness in watching two friends turn on each other, and a particular obscenity in watching a third party — the one who wishes them both dead — smile at the sight. That is what has come to pass, in the summer of 2026, between Poland and Ukraine. Not the familiar drama of Russia against the West, but something stranger and more disheartening: two allies, one of them fighting for its very existence, reaching back eighty years to open a grave. Poland’s deputy prime minister and defense minister, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz — the leader of its peasant party — announced that Ukraine will have serious trouble entering the European Union so long as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and its nationalists remain on its banners. One cannot, he said, raise onto a European pedestal those who destroy European cooperation; with Bandera, Ukraine will not enter the Union. And in almost the same breath — this is the detail that gives the game away — he added that Poland would not be handing over its MiG-29 fighter jets after all. History and weapons, fused in a single sentence.
I want to state the thing this essay will argue, because it is easy to lose in the noise. The wound is real. Volhynia was a real horror, not a fable; the people who died were really killed. But the war being fought over that wound today is manufactured — a genuine dispute among historians dragged, deliberately, onto the plane of present politics. And the question of who does the dragging is not a matter of taste on which reasonable people differ. There is no symmetry here. One side is pressing an old bruise for domestic advantage; the other is trying, while under fire, not to be provoked into pressing back.
The wound is real
Begin with honesty, because the whole case depends on it. Even the name of the thing is contested. In Polish historiography it is the Volhynia massacre; in Ukrainian, the Volhynia tragedy; the Polish Senate calls it a genocide of the Polish population. That disagreement is not pedantry — it is the first move of the war, fought over a single word.
The events themselves begin in March 1943, when the Ukrainian Insurgent Army carried out the mass killing of ethnic Polish civilians on lands where Poles and Ukrainians were alike citizens of Poland. As many as fifty thousand Poles died in that cleansing. In the late summer that followed, the Polish Home Army struck back, and in those reprisals perhaps fifteen to twenty thousand Ukrainian civilians were killed. The ranges are wide, the accounting bitterly disputed, and the totals shift depending on which years one agrees to count. I will not pretend, in an essay, to settle what a room full of historians has not. That refusal is the point. A thing this dark and this tangled belongs to scholars working with documents — not to a minister reaching for a talking point three years before an election.
A memory you cannot amputate
The reason no single year can be lifted out and made to stand for the whole is that historical memory is syncretic: it holds everything at once and issues one combined verdict. Pull 1943 out of its knot and you have already lied.
The knot is dense. In November 1918, during the Polish-Ukrainian war, Polish forces who had just taken Lviv carried out a pogrom against the city’s Jews — some seventy killed, hundreds wounded, thousands of families ruined. That pogrom is almost always forgotten in favor of the German-organized one of 1941, and the forgetting is itself instructive: this is exactly how a people blocks off the inconvenient segment of its memory to keep the picture clean. Through the 1930s, the Polish state “pacified” the Ukrainians of Galicia — beatings, arrests, shuttered schools, wrecked businesses. The dead there numbered in the dozens, not the thousands; but the deeper violence was the settling of Polish colonists on Ukrainian land and the pushing of peasants off the soil they lived from, which for people who live from the soil is a death sentence of another kind. The nationalist underground, founded in 1929 by former officers of a west-Ukrainian republic that Poland had occupied in 1919, was anti-Polish from its first breath; its most notorious act was the assassination of Poland’s interior minister in 1934. And when the Red Army seized western Ukraine in 1939, it scattered leaflets calling on Ukrainians to kill Poles. Two years after Volhynia, in the spring of 1945, a Home Army unit destroyed the village of Pawłokoma and killed some three hundred and sixty Ukrainians, women and children among them.
Lay all of that on the table and a comfortable evasion becomes impossible — the one that says the whole thing is simply the fault of “the ideology of nationalism.” It is a tempting sentence, and empty. Ideologies do not kill; people do, and the memory of those specific people cannot be surgically removed. Worse, the evasion hides a fact that is hard but true: there has never been a war of national liberation fought without nationalists, with all the ugliness nationalists bring. You do not get to keep the liberation and disown the men who fought it. That is not an argument for excusing what they did. It is an argument against pretending that history offers a clean side to stand on.
The men who reopen wounds for a living
If the wound is real, why is it bleeding now, in 2026, and not in some other year? Because there is, in Poland, an institution whose business is to keep such wounds available.
Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance was created for an honorable task: lustration and decommunization, the settling of accounts with a totalitarian past. But the task had an end, and the institution did not. When the work of exposing communist crimes was done, the machine survived and found new uses — the manufacture of historical grievances with which to strike political enemies. The point worth holding onto is not the biography of any one man but the shape of the thing: a body built to remember has been repurposed into a body that wounds. That the current Polish president rose through that institute and once led it matters less than what the institute has become. Give a state a permanent office for adjudicating the past, and sooner or later it will adjudicate the past for whoever holds power.
Watch the machine work. Ukraine’s parliament passed a law on a national pantheon, defining eligibility in the blandest possible terms — those who contributed significantly to the Ukrainian nation and its culture — with not one word about the Insurgent Army, the nationalists, or Bandera. Within hours the Polish president’s office branded its passage “another stage of escalation by Ukraine.” When a law that mentions none of the disputed names is itself an escalation, you are no longer in a disagreement about history; you are watching a search for pretexts, and had that law not existed, another pretext would have been found — a reburial, a flag, a greeting, a coat of arms. The timing is not mysterious either. Poland votes in the autumn of 2027, and hostility to Ukraine — over aid, over grain, over refugees — is a usable resource; the president’s rating climbed over the months of his history war.
It helps to keep two facts in view against the charge that Ukraine “glorifies fascists.” First, the heroization did not begin with the current government at all: it was a previous president, Viktor Yushchenko, who granted Bandera the title Hero of Ukraine, back in 2010, and a Ukrainian court that promptly annulled it. Second, the real surge in Bandera’s standing — from roughly forty percent approval to around seventy — is a product of this war, not a verdict on 1943. To most Ukrainians he is a symbol of resistance to the end, and Volhynia is very nearly absent from the popular mind; ask them and you will find that neither Bandera nor any Insurgent Army figure is the nation’s hero — that place belongs to the poet Shevchenko, as Poland’s belongs to John Paul II. And here is the tell that this is politics and not scholarship: when a Polish academic historian said aloud that Ukraine has the right to its own heroes, he was dismissed. Meanwhile Poland’s own pantheon is crowded with men who have Ukrainian blood on their hands — Piłsudski; General Józef Haller, who built prison camps for captured Ukrainian soldiers — and Ukraine, at the level of its state, has never once demanded that a single one of them be pulled down.
History as politics turned toward the past
There is a clever aphorism that keeps surfacing in this quarrel: that history is simply “politics turned toward the past.” It is offered as sophistication. It is in fact the enemy’s whole method, stated aloud. If history really is politics aimed backward, then it belongs to the propagandists — to every state that has ever manufactured a usable past — and the aphorism becomes a license. History is not that. History is a science, answerable to documents and evidence; what a state calls its “historical policy” is propaganda wearing a scholar’s gown. And underneath sits a simple principle that ought to end most of these fights before they start: every nation has the right to its own heroes, and no neighbor has standing to march into someone else’s house and rearrange the icons.
To see where the “politics turned toward the past” doctrine leads when it is followed to the end, look east, at the pure case. In Russia the same disease has been turned fully inward. The statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, is being returned to its plinth before the Lubyanka — a country, as one might put it, stepping ever more confidently onto the road of imperial fascism. The state has taken the shuttered museum of the Gulag’s history and, on the very same site, opened a “Museum of the Memory of the Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People” — a memory chip ejected and another slotted in. And it stages atrocity scenes on the model of Gleiwitz, the SS false-flag of 1939 that manufactured a pretext for the last great war against Poland. This is what a national memory becomes when the politicians win their war against the historians. It is the future that Poland’s own memory politics is renting, one grievance at a time.
The only winner
Now the hard sentence, to be said once and plainly. In this memory war, Poland loses and Ukraine loses, and there is exactly one beneficiary, and it is Russia.
This is not an inference from motive alone; there is a trace. Trace the Volhynia material back through the outlets that pushed and reproduced it and the roots run to Russia. The topic was seeded in Polish social media years ago through dozens of transparently pro-Kremlin channels, running the reliable chain — networks, then the young, then the provocateurs, then the wider society — until a scholars’ quarrel had been lifted onto the interstate level and, worse, the inter-ethnic one; more and more of the anti-Ukrainian material now flies openly under the Russian flag. One should be precise about culpability. The Polish president almost certainly took no rubles; he builds an ordinary populism on the rawest nerve he can find, which is a domestic sin, not a foreign one. But that the Kremlin’s paid media and propaganda machine spun this history up can be treated as an established fact. And the sociology settles what motive cannot: Polish hostility toward Ukrainians has climbed from seventeen percent to forty-three in three years, while Ukrainian hostility toward Poles sits at around eight — and Polish hostility toward Russia runs above ninety-five. The forty-three percent is a bruise being pressed, not a national idea. Anti-Ukrainianism is a resource in Polish politics; anti-Polishness is not a resource in Ukrainian politics; and the one country both of them still hate almost unanimously is the one profiting from the fight.
Why a family quarrel endangers Europe
It would be easy to file all this under diplomacy and move on, and that would be a mistake, because the stakes are larger than a spat between capitals. Take first the threat that sounds gravest — the veto over accession. It is, in truth, the least of it: membership is dated to 2030 at the earliest and cannot be hurried, so the block is at most a moral minus. The real damage is elsewhere, in the aid that can be cut and the Ukrainians in Poland who can be treated worse, and above all in the fact that Poland is very nearly the key channel through which Western weapons reach Ukraine. To saw at that branch, at this moment, is self-mutilation dressed as principle.
The deeper danger is one that reaches every democracy, Poland’s neighbors included. The technological revolution in how opinion is made has handed murky populists a road to power they could not otherwise have taken, and with it the ability to impose an agenda that few, examined in daylight, would choose. And support once thought unshakeable can vanish with frightening ease. Everyone believed the United States would never abandon Ukraine — and then it did, without much difficulty. That risk now reaches Europe, and it will grow, because fatigue grows the longer a war lasts. Which is what makes the worst scenario worth naming precisely, so that it can be refused. The quarrel today runs between Poland and Ukraine. Carry it inside Ukraine — set Ukrainians to fighting one another over Bandera and the rest instead of fighting the invader — and you will have handed Moscow the one prize its army was never able to seize. That is the line that must not be crossed, and everyone tempted to demand that Ukraine hold a reckoning with its past right now, in the middle of the war, should understand that they are asking it to trade a war against Russia for a war against its own memory.
What a grown-up nation does with its own past
There is a better way to carry a dark history, and it is not a mystery. The dispute belongs in a room with Polish and Ukrainian historians in it and the politicians shown the door. Even then one should be modest about the pace: the most that a famous joint conference on Volhynia could once claim as a success was that the participants did not come to blows, and real reconciliation — the Franco-German kind — comes after a war, not during it. It cannot be forced to a schedule set by an election.
And it requires honesty in both directions, which is why the strongest thing Ukraine could say is a concession. There is a genuine Polish grievance underneath the manufactured campaign: for years, on Ukrainian soil, the exhumation of Polish victims was obstructed, at a time when Germany was exhuming its war dead without much trouble. On that narrow point Ukraine may well be at fault, and to say so plainly would cost almost nothing and buy almost everything — for it shows, by contrast, how small the real grievance is beside the vast machinery of political attack that has been bolted on top of it. The model for this kind of maturity already exists. Poland and Czechia openly debate their own cruelty in expelling millions of Germans after the war — and they do it though six million Polish citizens died at German hands, on the sound principle that a tragedy suffered grants no license for revenge on civilians. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, asked by Poland’s own prime minister Donald Tusk to mediate this fight, declined with the wisest sentence anyone has offered in it: do not drag the skeletons out of the closet, because they can come to life and crush your own house.
So let the last word be a distinction. The current Polish president is a wart on the body of Poland; he is not Poland. Poland is a great humanistic culture — the country of Sztompka and Bauman — and it is, in hard fact, the ally carrying more weapons to Ukraine than almost anyone. The tragedy is not that two neighbors share a terrible thing in their past; every pair of neighbors does. The tragedy is that, with the enemy of both standing at the gate, they have chosen this of all moments to press on the old wound — and that the only man who profits from a war between friends is the one who did not have to lift a finger to start it, but only to wait.
Prepared in the spirit of the “thinking together” principle that Igor Yakovenko follows in his “7-40” cycle on YouTube. The essay nonetheless voices the author’s own opinions, which may diverge from those of Igor Yakovenko.