On June 19, news arrived that many people around the world did not understand: the President of Poland revoked the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest honor, from the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. Why? What happened?

Nawrocki’s statement can be found in English here.

What would happen if German Chancellor Merz requested to bring the body of Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s right-hand man, to the Pantheon of national heroes and decided to name an elite German military unit “Heroes of the SS”? A massive uproar would break out. Yet, events of this magnitude are happening right now in President Zelensky’s Ukraine, amid the silence of foreign ministries and world public opinion. President Nawrocki’s decision has drawn world attention to the worrying nationalist drift in Ukraine.

Ukraine is systematically building a personality cult around criminal figures responsible for the extermination of non-Ukrainian populations, predominantly Poles, and, at the same time, is blocking the exhumation of victims so that the world does not see the scale of the genocide perpetrated during World War II. Stepan Bandera, leader of the Ukrainian nationalists, who is buried in Munich, is slated to be exhumed and placed in the Pantheon of Illustrious Ukrainians.

This is not the only baffling gesture by Ukrainian rulers in recent days. On Tuesday, May 26, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a decree naming the “North” Special Operations Center of the Special Forces of Ukraine after the “Heroes of the UPA.” Meanwhile, on Monday, May 25, the ashes of Andriy Melnyk—one of the leaders of the OUN and a major collaborator of the Third Reich—were buried in the National Military Cemetery of Ukraine.

“Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to name a military unit ‘Heroes of the UPA’ is a scandal. It is difficult to define it as anything other than a demonstration of extreme ingratitud toward a nation that opened its borders to Ukraine from the very first day of the war. The UPA is the symbol of genocide, of the brutal murder of Polish women, children, and entire villages in Volhynia and Eastern Lesser Poland,” stated Professor Przemysław Czarnek, a PiS MP and former Minister of Culture, on social media.

Polish President Karol Nawrocki himself reacted to this disconcerting news and intends to convene a meeting of the Chapter of the Order of the White Eagle to revoke the highest Polish honor bestowed upon Volodymyr Zelensky. Such an emotional and decisive reaction is not surprising.

Since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, Poland was the first country to help the nation attacked by Russia on an unprecedented scale: it opened its borders to millions of refugees; Polish families welcomed foreign refugees into their homes, often asking for nothing in return; schools welcomed Ukrainian children, hospitals treated the wounded, and ordinary people organized collections of food, clothing, and medicine. Poland also provided massive military and political support, becoming one of Ukraine’s most important allies in Europe. It also mobilized other countries, which had often merely expected a swift Ukrainian defeat. Many Poles helped out of pure generosity; therefore, today, more and more people are asking: why such ingratitude from the Ukrainians?

To understand what is happening in Ukraine today, one must recall historical facts—almost completely unknown to world public opinion—from a time when the Ukrainian state did not exist.

In 1929, Ukrainian exiles founded the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a nationalist, anti-communist party with a distinct Nazi-fascist character. The purpose of the OUN was the creation of an independent Ukrainian state by any method, including deception, armed struggle, and terrorism, within the territories of countries inhabited by Ukrainians—meaning primarily in what was then Poland, but also in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. The main leader of the nationalists was Stepan Bandera, who as early as 1934 organized the assassination of the Minister of the Interior of the Polish government, Bronisław Pieracki, and was sentenced to life imprisonment for it, but was later freed by the Germans who occupied Poland.

In 1941, the former eastern regions of Poland were occupied by the Germans, and Ukrainian nationalists saw Hitler’s Germany as their best ally. OUN members split into supporters of Andriy Melnyk and Stepan Bandera. The former opted for closer cooperation with the Germans and later created the SS “Galizien” division that fought alongside them. The latter also collaborated with the Nazis, organizing the “Nachtigall” battalion, but remained more independent of the Germans.

In 1942, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was created in the Volhynia region as the military wing of Bandera’s faction of the OUN. It was precisely the members of the UPA who perpetrated the extermination of approximately 120,000 Polish civilians with the aim of creating an ethnically “pure” Ukrainian state. This was a planned genocide, serving the mad idea of “liberating Ukraine from the Poles”; it was not a “Polish-Ukrainian war” involving clashes between armed formations, but a total extermination of the population, including [children/everyone – note: word incomplete in original text “do”]. They also sought to eliminate every trace of Polish presence in these lands. The victims of the Ukrainian nationalists also included Jews, Armenians, and Czechs.

On June 30, 1941, Bandera’s followers, without the knowledge or consent of Berlin, announced the creation of an independent Ukrainian state in Lviv. This act provoked Hitler’s anger, who had Bandera interned in Germany. Even though Bandera himself did not take part in the massacres in Volhynia because he was interned by the Germans, he was the very mastermind behind the genocide of the Poles. The slogan “Ukraine without Poles” was born within his political circle. For this reason, his moral responsibility for the genocide cannot be denied.

Bandera was released by the Nazis in 1944 and began fighting the advancing Red Army as it moved westward, organizing guerrilla actions against the Soviets. This guerrilla warfare continued even after the end of the war. Meanwhile, Bandera escaped to Germany, where he lived under the protection of Western secret services, who wanted to use him in the fight against the Soviets. It was precisely in Munich, Bavaria, where he was assassinated by a KGB agent in 1959.

Today, an independent Ukraine in search of “national heroes” has “re-evaluated” criminal figures like Bandera, Melnyk, or Dmytro Klyachkivsky—the UPA commander in Volhynia and the main person responsible for the slaughter of the Poles—through a nationalist lens. But a Ukraine that wants to be “democratic” cannot found its national identity by praising Nazi-fascists responsible for horrendous crimes as “fathers of the nation,” thereby also providing a pretext for Russian propaganda.

The foreign ministries of EU countries and the European Commission should think twice about the process of Ukraine’s accession to the Union, taking into account these deeply concerning facts that disqualify the candidate: the rampant corruption that has become endemic and reaches the highest levels of the state, and the glorification of Hitler’s collaborators and exterminators of non-Ukrainian populations as national heroes.

The article in Italian was published on the website of La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana.