The memory wars

On 26 May 2026, President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree granting an elite Special Forces unit the honorary name “Heroes of the UPA.” The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was a nationalist paramilitary formation which, after a period of collaboration with the Nazi occupation authorities in 1941–1942, partially turned against them and fought the Soviet Union. At the same time, in 1943–1944, UPA units carried out a systematic ethnic cleansing of the Polish population in Volhynia (today western Ukraine, before 1939 part of Poland), in which approximately 100,000 Polish civilians, including women and children, were killed.

In Kyiv, the decree was presented as a gesture to boost the morale of soldiers fighting the Russian invasion. In Warsaw, it was read as an affront to Polish historical memory.

Poland’s reaction was swift and bipartisan. President Karol Nawrocki announced that he would petition the relevant state body to strip Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle — Poland’s highest civilian decoration, awarded to him in 2023 for his conduct during the Russian invasion. “President Zelensky has proven that Ukraine — through its glorification of bandits, murderers from the UPA — is not ready to be part of the European family,” Nawrocki declared. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk tried to ease tensions, but he himself spoke of the “grim legacy of the UPA.” Lech Wałęsa, the legendary Solidarity leader, Nobel laureate, and former president, publicly removed a Ukrainian flag from his chest, speaking of an “affront” to his fallen countrymen.

The dispute is not just about the decree. For Poles, gestures like Zelensky’s are impossible to interpret in abstract historical terms. They strike them as messages aimed directly at their trauma. Ukrainians often fail to understand why the Polish reaction is so vehement. Despite sharing a border, cultural proximity, and the awareness of Russia as a threat, the two countries live with two very different maps of memory.

For Poles, Volhynia, the UPA, and Stepan Bandera — the leader of the OUN, the UPA’s political wing — are above all synonyms of Ukrainian genocide. This interpretation has been woven into Polish institutions and the collective imagination. A Polish textbook for fourteen-year-olds, for example, states: “Members of the UPA and the Ukrainian populace incited by them murdered the Poles living there — the elderly, women, and children, often in an extremely brutal manner.” Students learn the term “Bloody Sunday” — 11 July 1943, when the UPA attacked around one hundred Polish villages. The chapter summary reads: “The Volhynian Massacre is a crime of genocide committed in 1943–1944 by members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) together with the Ukrainian populace against Poles.

Ukrainian textbooks present a more complex picture. A 2023 textbook states: “The OUN and UPA considered the expulsion or destruction of the Polish element in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia as removing an obstacle to Ukraine’s aspirations for independence.” The same textbook adds: “Some barbaric methods and means used by Ukrainians against the Polish population, and by Poles against Ukrainians, cannot be justified.” The authors emphasise that the conflict was ignited by the Germans, pursuing a “divide and rule” strategy. They quote Gauleiter Erich Koch: “We must bring it about that a Pole, meeting a Ukrainian, wants to kill him, and that a Ukrainian, seeing a Pole, also wants to kill him. And if on the way they kill a Jew together — even better.”

To this is added the Holodomor — the man-made famine of 1932–1933, which killed millions of Ukrainians. For Ukrainians, this is not just one trauma among many, but the central trauma, a filter, a nation-building myth through which they perceive all later history. Poland recognised the Holodomor as genocide in a Senate resolution of March 2006 — a gesture that was noted in Kyiv, but had no impact on their reinterpretation of the Volhynia events

As Grzegorz Motyka, one of Poland’s leading scholars on the subject, emphasises, the UPA’s action was a planned ethnic cleansing. Motyka does not downplay Polish retaliatory actions — carried out mainly by the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK), the Polish underground army loyal to the Polish government-in-exile. Yet unlike the UPA, the AK collaborated neither with the Third Reich nor with the USSR, and its programme never called for the extermination of any ethnic group. Its retaliatory actions — though they cost the lives of 10,000 to 12,000 Ukrainian civilians — were aimed primarily at stopping the wave of murders, not at the physical removal of an entire community. Motyka opposes any false symmetry:

Putting an equal sign between the actions of the UPA and the Home Army should be regarded as an intellectual construct that is historically false and, as contrary to the facts, also morally false.

Moreover, as Motyka adds, the cruelty of the UPA was not an accidental outburst of popular anger, but a deliberate method:

The mass killings of the Polish population were carried out so brutally because the perpetrators of this organised crime planned them that way, rightly assuming that nothing would better conceal the nature of their acts than ‘dressing them in the garb’ of a peasant uprising.

The scholar quotes Mykhailo Kolodzinsky, an OUN theoretician who trained alongside the Croatian Ustaše in fascist Italy. In his “Ukrainian War Doctrine” (1938), he wrote: “A nationalist uprising must be a volcano in which everything that is hostile — dead or alive — will burn.” And further: “Towards the hostile element we must show such cruelty that even the tenth generation will be afraid to even look towards Ukraine.”

The Polish-German historian Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe adds that Ukrainian auxiliary policemen — later absorbed into the UPA — had helped the Germans exterminate Jews from 1941 onward. Once the apparatus of violence was ready, it was turned against Poles.

The problem is that Ukrainians simply deny this. In their narratives, Volhynia is placed in a broader context: of often nationalistic (though not criminal) Polish interwar policies, German “divide and rule” strategy, and Soviet chaos. For many Ukrainians, the UPA remains a formation that fought the greatest enemy, the USSR, and its crimes are a regrettable but not invalidating addition to the story of the fight for statehood.

The lack of common ground for dialogue means that historical disputes easily spill over into the public sphere, where they are reduced to simplistic terms. Football stadiums are the best example of this.

At the end of 2025, we sent questionnaires to several dozen fan communities in Poland and Ukraine — asking about the ongoing war with Russia, stadium alliances, and the historical slogans appearing in the stands. The responses revealed two completely different worlds.

Polish fan groups — from Legia Warszawa, Wisła Kraków, Lech Poznań, and Śląsk Wrocław to smaller clubs like Miedź Legnica or Stomil Olsztyn — mostly ignored the questions. Only two responded. One simply said: “pa szoł won” (“Get the hell out!” stylised in Russian). Another replied: “As a self-respecting fan, I will not talk to journalists.”

The Ukrainian response was different. Among groups connected to Dynamo Kyiv, Shakhtar Donetsk, Metalist Kharkiv, and smaller groups, the slogan “A Ukrainian and a Pole are brothers” met with a majority of neutral or friendly responses — around 95 percent. Instead of words, we often received an emoji of clenched fists (a gesture of brotherhood). One exception, however, showed how deep the wound remains. Ultras from Kovel — a town not just anywhere, but right in Volhynia — sent a message to Polish fans through us: “Ruska kurwa!” (A Russian whore!). And then, no longer an insult but a threat against those who make alliances with Russians: “We will kill you all!”

This aggression is abnormal, but its presence reminds us that the memory of Volhynia has not been closed on either side. For Ukrainian ultras, war is an everyday reality — not since 2022, but since 2014. Stadiums in the east of the country lie in ruins. “Sometimes you go to a national team match, but that’s an exception,” one response reads. “Most of the time is devoted to war — you’re either at the front or for the front.” Another is even more blunt: “Fans are the people, fanatics are the nation. Ultras are the engine of protests, ready to defend an idea at the cost of their lives.” Thus, the issue of Volhynia is important to most of them, but in the context of the threat from Russia — it is not the most important.

Polish fans act differently and more often perpetuate historical divisions. A scene from as far back as 2015 illustrates this well. A recording of a march by Legia Warsaw fans through the centre of Kyiv shows a fan wearing a T-shirt with the Russian inscription “Русский эскадрон смерти” — “Russian Death Squadron,” glorifying Russian special units fighting in Ukraine. The comments expressed disbelief: “there’s a guy in a ‘RUSSIAN DEATH SQUADRON’ T-shirt… how do you understand that in Kyiv????”. One Polish fan replied in a way that sounds extremely provocative to Ukrainians: “Fuck the UPA and Bandera!” Today, such slogans — vulgarly directed against the UPA and Bandera — are common in Polish stadiums.

The dispute continues because the underlying problem has not been resolved. For years, Polish historians and, especially, the families of the victims appealed to the authorities in Kyiv for permission to exhume the remains of Poles murdered in Volhynia. After World War II, the borders were shifted west, and Volhynia ended up on the side of the Ukrainian SSR. After 1991, Poland hoped that an independent Ukraine would at least enable the dignified location, identification, and burial of the victims. For a long time, this did not happen — especially in places directly linked to UPA crimes. The dispute, then, was not just historical but moral: it concerned the right to burial, to memory, and to calling things by their name.

The full-scale Russian invasion in 2022 seemed like a moment when the impasse might be broken. A gesture of goodwill could have been expected in return for Poland’s unquestionable assistance to Ukraine.

An apparent breakthrough came in 2025, when the Ukrainian side agreed to exhumation work in Puźniki. However, the village is located outside Volhynia, and thus such brutal and mass UPA crimes did not occur there. Nevertheless, the Polish team found the remains of over 40 people, including at least 11 children. DNA tests confirmed the scale of the crime. But no common interpretation was agreed upon. For Poles, it is another UPA crime outside the Volhynia area. For some Ukrainian historians it was a tragic episode in a broader conflict, a “battle” between the UPA and the NKVD, the Soviet security services. Thus, technical cooperation did not translate into agreement on the meaning of the events.

A few months later, on the Polish side, in Jureczkowa in the Subcarpathian region, Ukrainian teams searched for the remains of UPA soldiers who fell in 1947 while defending Ukrainian villages from forced resettlement during akcja “Wisła” (Operation Vistula). Operation Vistula was the deportation of Ukrainians and Lemkos from south-eastern Poland by the communist authorities. Ukrainians try to equate it with the Volhynian massacre, but this is a false symmetry: deportation is not genocide. 

The Polish authorities avoided escalation, and the strategic importance of supporting a fighting Ukraine promoted calm among participants in the debate. Yet a growing sense of injustice festered. Neither Warsaw nor Kyiv addressed the sources of tension as the problem was subordinated to current political and wartime needs. 

Poland will not stop calling the Volhynian events genocide. Ukraine will not abandon its own story of resistance and independence

Zelensky’s decision was not accidental. Ukraine has entered the fifth year of full-scale war and its people are exhausted. Tensions are rising between the authorities and the military, the country is struggling with corruption, and the president’s closest associates are being jailed. In such conditions, politicians reach for symbolism as a means of mobilising and ordering the community. Zelensky, who before the war distanced himself from the cult of the UPA, now acts according to a very different logic. In 2022, Ukraine was fighting primarily for the survival of the state. In 2026, it is also fighting for the story that will bind the state together after the war. Naming a unit “Heroes of the UPA” is therefore not a gesture towards Poland as much as it is a gesture towards his own society. The problem is that in Poland, it cannot be read as anything other than a slap in the face to the memory of the victims of Volhynia.

There is no easy solution. Poland will not stop calling the Volhynian events genocide. Ukraine will not abandon its own story of resistance and independence. There is, however, another path. Instead of the ethnic scheme of “Poles — victims, Ukrainians — perpetrators,” it is worth returning to the basic fact: the Volhynian crime was a massacre of Polish citizens of the Second Polish Republic by other citizens of the same state, but of Ukrainian nationality. Both the murdered Poles and the Ukrainians, members of the UPA — before the outbreak of World War II — were formally Polish citizens. The UPA operated on the territory of the Polish state, which had been partitioned by two totalitarian occupiers.

Adopting such a framework opens up space for concrete solutions regarding the citizens of Poland: creating a central register of victims of the Second Polish Republic, a state DNA database, institutionalising memory, and symbolic burials (alas, we should not delude ourselves that Ukraine will agree to exhumations). Simultaneously, Poland could criminalise for denying Volhynian atrocities — on the model of Holocaust-related legislation — and ban the public display of UPA symbols — analogous to the ban on swastikas or the hammer and sickle. This would allow Poland to fulfill its obligation to the victims without interfering in Ukraine’s internal decisions.

The consequences of the current tensions extend far beyond diplomacy. The growing, openly expressed hostility of Poles towards Ukrainians could trigger a wave of departures — including people in occupations crucial to the economy, such as doctors and nurses. For a country that has advanced to the ranks of the world’s twenty largest economies, this would be a severe blow.

Thus, there are only two scenarios. Either Polish decision-makers quickly convert public anger into legal and institutional solutions that secure Poland’s memory without breaking the alliance with Kyiv, or, on a wave of rising frustration, forces will come to power that question the current level of support for Ukraine.

Even in this second, worse scenario, Poland will not completely stop military aid to Ukraine — because that lies in its own security interest. But in either scenario, society will no longer agree to a fast-track accession for Ukraine to the European Union, and presumably also to NATO.

There must be peace in the memory wars.