The Polish Deputy Prime Minister stated that Ukraine cannot enter the EU without resolving the Volhynia massacre case, while a representative of the Sejm directly demands that Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, should be declared persona non grata in Poland.


Ukraine cannot enter the European Union (EU) without the dignified reburial and proper commemoration of the approximately one hundred thousand Polish victims of the Volhynia massacre committed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) between 1943-1945.

Polish Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of National Defense Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz announced on Friday.

The head of the ministry, who is on a visit to the United States, responded to the Ukrainian foreign minister's statement on Polish public radio on Wednesday. Dmitro Kuleba, together with Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, took part in a panel discussion in Olsztyn, north-eastern Poland, where he asked the audience,

his answer to a question regarding the halted excavation of mass graves hiding the victims of the Volhynian massacre (Wolyn in Polish) in 2017 caused several negative reactions in Poland.

"We have no problem with continuing the exhumation. We have only one request to the Polish government, that they also respect the memory of the Ukrainians," the minister replied, reports TVN24 , Magyar Nemzet .

Kuleba also stated:

Let's leave history to the historians and build the future together.

Kosiniak-Kamysz also called Kuleba's answer unacceptable. Without exhuming the victims and commemorating them, "there can be no question of Ukraine joining the EU," he declared. "This is not a historical issue, it is a question of healing a wound that still hurts to this day," he emphasized. He added: he is speaking on the subject as a member of parliament of the Polish Peasant Party, which forms the government coalition, and not as a deputy prime minister and minister.

Speaking about the massacre in Volhynia in Olsztyn, Kuleba referred to the Vistula operation carried out by the Polish communist authorities in the spring of 1947.

During this process, on the pretext of the fight against the UPA, around 140,000 people of Ukrainian nationality were forcibly relocated from the southeastern part of Poland to the western territories annexed to the country after the Second World War.

The Ukrainian foreign minister said that during the Vistula operation, Ukrainians were "forcibly resettled from Ukrainian territories".

    "If we started digging in history today (...), we could go very deep into the events of the past and we could throw the bad things that the Poles did to the Ukrainians and the Ukrainians to the Poles in each other's eyes"

he declared.

He said: he talked about the exhumation in Volhynia with Radoslaw Sikorski. As he said, there is "no problem" with the continuation of the operation, but Kiev expects reciprocity and commemoration of the Ukrainians from Warsaw.

Bilateral relations cannot be dominated by emotions, "let's leave history to the historians, let's build the future together ," said the Ukrainian foreign minister.

Radoslaw Sikorski told the PAP news agency after the podium discussion in Olsztyn on Wednesday: "We can deal with the past, which is important, our victims deserve a Christian burial, but unfortunately we are unable to revive them." According to another approach, it is possible to focus on building a common future, "so that the demons of the past do not revive in our societies, and the common enemy does not endanger us in the future." He added: he is a supporter of the other approach.

Confirmed:

the Volhynia issue "represents a problem in bilateral relations", which Ukraine "hopefully will solve in the spirit of gratitude for the assistance provided by Poland".

On Thursday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Kyiv issued a statement, according to which Kuleba's statement in Olsztyn referring to "Ukrainian territories" meant the territories of Poland "where Ukrainians lived in a closed community." They emphasized: Kuleba did not thereby express a territorial claim against Poland.

"After Dmytro Kulebá's scandalous, revisionist statement about Volhynia and the Vistula operation about "forcible displacements from Ukrainian territories" (!!!), this politician should be declared persona non grata in Poland"

Janusz Kowalski, representative of the Polish Sejm, wrote on X in response to the case.

Earlier, Poland called on  Volodymyr Zelenskiy to apologize to the Polish people for the massacre in Volhynia, but he refused .

MTI / Civilek.info

Cover photo: Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitro Kuleba - MTI/EPA/Pool/Reuters/Thomas Peter