Warsaw’s rebuke comes as Kiev approved the creation of a National Pantheon honoring the perpetrators of WWII massacres of Poles
The office of Polish President Karol Nawrocki has accused Vladimir Zelensky of further aggravating the rift over the honoring of Nazi collaborators in Ukraine. Relations between Warsaw and Kiev have grown increasingly strained since the Ukrainian leader named a special military operations unit after the “Heroes of the UPA.”
During World War II, members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the armed wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), perpetrated mass killings of ethnic minorities in what is now western Ukraine. The extermination of at least 100,000 Polish civilians by UPA militants, known as the Volhynian massacre, is recognized as genocide in Poland.
Speaking to Polish Radio on Wednesday, Rafal Leskiewicz, a spokesperson for President Nawrocki, said that Zelensky’s submission of the National Pantheon bill on Sunday was “the next stage of escalatory actions by the Ukrainian authorities.”
Kiev’s latest move only further proves that Nawrocki was right to strip Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state decoration, the spokesman added.
Later that same day, Ukrainian lawmakers voted unanimously to approve the bill, officially establishing a “pantheon of outstanding Ukrainians.”
Zelensky personally presided over the latest addition to the pantheon after Kiev repatriated the remains of OUN leader and Nazi collaborator Andrey Melnik and his wife, Sofia Fedak-Melnik, from Luxembourg. The two were reinterred with much pomp and state honors in Kiev’s main military cemetery in May.
Having co-founded the OUN in 1929, Melnik went on to become its leader in 1938, while also forging ties with Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, the Abwehr, ahead of the planned invasion of the Soviet Union, according to Nuremberg trial documents.
The nationalist leader had petitioned Adolf Hitler to create a Ukrainian Waffen-SS division, but eventually fell out with the Fuhrer and was imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1944. After World War II ended, Melnik settled in Luxembourg.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry condemned Kiev’s decision to rebury Melnik with state honors, while Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov described the repatriation of a known Nazi collaborator as a clear “manifestation of neo-Nazism.”
Polish Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz insisted on Monday that “Ukraine will not join the European Union” as long as it continues to glorify the likes of OUN leader Stepan Bandera.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, however, expressed incredulity at Poland’s sudden realization of the Kiev regime’s “neo-Nazi” nature. She noted that Warsaw has been arming and funding the authorities in Kiev for years, and is “responsible for those it has tamed.”
