Warsaw, Poland. Poland’s prime minister said on Friday that Ukraine was looking for ways to lower tensions with Warsaw amid a diplomatic dispute linked to wartime history. He also said Ukraine should come to terms with its history to join the European Union.
Diplomatic tensions deepen
Diplomatic relations between the two countries entered their worst crisis since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine after Polish President Karol Nawrocki stripped Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Poland’s top honour.
Nawrocki said he took the step because an army unit had been named after insurgents who massacred Poles during World War Two.
Polish government signals possible de-escalation
Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a political opponent of Nawrocki, has been trying to reduce tensions and said he had received positive signals from a meeting in Warsaw on Friday between Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha and Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski.
“I don’t know the results of the meeting, but I have signals that the Ukrainian side is looking for ways to ease the tension,” Tusk told a news conference.
In a separate press conference, Sikorski declined to discuss details of the meeting, saying only that “diplomacy prefers silence”.
Ukraine proposes anti-crisis steps
Sybiha said in a post on X that he had proposed “a package of anti-crisis steps”, including organising a meeting of World War Two historians and asking religious leaders to take part in dialogue.
However, he did not indicate that Kyiv would change the name of the military unit at the centre of the dispute.
“We respect the history of others, and we expect the same approach toward our own history and independence from our partners,” he said.
Dispute over the UPA legacy
Some Ukrainians regard the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) as heroic for the resistance it mounted against the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and as a symbol of Kyiv’s struggle for independence from Moscow.
But the UPA was also involved in the Volhynia massacres, a series of killings from 1943 to 1945 in which Poland says around 100,000 Poles were killed by Ukrainian nationalists. Thousands of Ukrainians also died in reprisal killings.
