Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has threatened to block Ukraine’s bid to join the EU unless it bends to Warsaw’s demands on the WW2-era Volyn massacre, a mass killing of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists.
Tusk made the pledge in the wake of a political scandal in Poland following a disastrous visit by Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba, who made multiple highly-controversial statements on the history of the two countries.
“Ukrainians, with all our respect and our support for their military effort, must realize that joining the EU is also joining a political and historical culture. So, until there is respect for these standards on the part of Ukraine, Ukraine will not become a member of the European family,” Tusk stated.
The PM condemned Kuleba's “unequivocally negative” remarks. “Ukraine, one way or another, will have to meet Poland’s expectations,” Tusk insisted.
Kuleba delivered his ill-advised remarks on Wednesday while speaking in the northern Polish city of Olsztyn. While promising not to oppose exhumations to help understand the Volyn massacre, a brutal act of mass murder in which Ukrainian nationalists slaughtered up to 100,000 Poles between 1943 and 1945. The diplomat urged the two nations to “leave history to historians” and not to dig up “the bad things that the Poles did to Ukrainians and Ukrainians to Poles.”
Militants with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) killed at least 60,000 ethnic Poles between in the regions of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, which currently belong to Ukraine.
Some historians estimate that the toll is even higher, suggesting up to 120,000 victims were murdered. While Warsaw has recognized the massacre as a genocide of Poles, modern Ukraine has been celebrating the perpetrators as “freedom fighters” and “national heroes.”
Kuleba also invoked the 1947 Operation Vistula, a forced resettlement of Ukrainians from southeastern Poland to the west of the country. The controversial action was aimed at the destruction of local UPA holdouts, as the resettlement deprived them of the support of the locals. Some 140,000 people were deported during the operation and became scattered in the west of the country.
Kiev's top diplomat also brought some of his own demands for Polish authorities, such as respecting the “memory of Ukrainians” who had been forcibly expelled from Ukrainian territories. The remark was extremely poorly received in the host country, as some perceived it as a thinly veiled hint at potential territorial demands.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry had to step in, insisting Kuleba never meant it like that, merely describing the region where a “compact Ukrainian community” has been living before the deportation as the “Ukrainian territory.”