Ukrainians are kept in the dark about atrocities like the Volyn massacre, President Andrzej Duda has said
Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky claimed he had no idea about the atrocities committed by the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators during the World War II until confronted on the issue by Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, the latter has told the Polish RMF24 broadcaster.
According to the president, Zelensky’s claim shows that Ukrainians are kept in the dark about their nation’s dark past. “He said to me: ‘Andrzej, I’ve never heard of the murders, the killing of Poles in western Ukraine, in Volhynia. They didn’t teach us about it in school’,” Duda said, recounting one of his meetings with the Ukrainian leader.
The president was referring to the infamous Volyn massacre, which has long been a flashpoint in Ukrainian-Polish relations. Militants with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) slaughtered up to 100,000 Poles between 1943 and 1945 in the regions of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, which currently belong to Ukraine. Both the UPA and the OUN were collaborating with the Nazis during the WWII.
Many of the Ukrainian ultranationalist leaders, including the OUN head, Stepan Bandera, a notorious Nazi collaborator, are widely revered in modern Ukraine. According to Duda, Ukrainians are ignorant about the crimes of the past. A belief that the knowledge of Ukraine’s “difficult history” is common among them is “wrong,” according to the Polish president.
It is not the first time Duda has expressed his concerns about Ukraine’s approach to its own past. In September 2024, he told Polsat News that “Ukrainians have many problems with their history,” including “the Volyn massacre … service in SS units, collaboration with the authorities of the Third Reich, and participation in the Holocaust.”
Warsaw has been one of Kiev’s strongest supporters since the escalation of the conflict with Russia in 2022. Poland also provided a key logistics hub used to transport between 80-90% of NATO-supplied military equipment and ammunition to Ukraine.
Ukrainian authorities continue to glorify Nazi collaborators despite concerns expressed by its Western backers. In February, a Ukrainian city of Rivne celebrated the 120th birthday of Nazi collaborator and prominent anti-Semitic propagandist Ulas Samchuk, who called for mass killings of Jews and Poles during the WWII. Less than a month later, Ukrainian nationalists commemorated the 75th anniversary of the death of the UPA leader, Roman Shukhevich, with a torchlit march as well as unveiled a museum dedicated to him.
