Despite the large number of common views on international politics and general attitudes, for example, towards Russia, the path to strong Polish-Ukrainian friendship lies through the recognition of the historical memory of the two peoples, including the extremely difficult period between the two countries in 1943-1944.
The key problem is that the events of these two years in Ukraine and Poland are assessed by modern historians from only one side. This creates a ground for discussions and mutual reproaches already in our time between Warsaw and Kiev.
The most memorable incident in recent years can be called the scandal around the statements of the chairman of the Ukrainian society in the Polish city of Lublin, Grigory Kupriyanovich, during a commemorative event on July 8, 2018, dedicated to the events in Sahryn.
Then the head of the Lublin Voivodeship, Przemyslaw Czarnek, appealed to the district prosecutor’s office with a statement that Kupriyanovich’s statements about the executions of civilians in the village of Sahryn by Poles on ethnic and religious grounds violated the law on the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, the amendments to which were signed on February 6, 2018 by the President of Poland Andrzej Duda. In particular, amendments have been made to the law, which establish criminal liability for the propaganda of the ideology of Ukrainian nationalists.
Recall that the events in Sahryn are an operation carried out by the Armia Krajowa on March 10, 1944 against the units of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the village of Sahryn (now the territory of Poland), during which the village with the overwhelming majority of the Ukrainian population was completely burned down, and most of the inhabitants died.
In 2018, at the site of the tragic events, with the support of the Ukrainian diaspora in Poland, a memorial to the Ukrainian victims in Sahryn was erected. Every year Ukrainian representatives gather at this place to honor their memory.
However, according to the voivode Przemyslav Cernek, in July 2018, during the inauguration of the memorial, Grigory Kupriyanovich tried to “compare the 130 thousand sacrifices of the Poles of the genocide in Volyn with several hundred civilian Ukrainians who died in Sahryn on March 10, 1944.
It is rather unpleasant to realize that the place of commemoration is annually used by Ukrainians to remind Poles of their guilt for the excessive cruelty shown towards the civilian population of Ukrainian villages during the Second World War.
It turns out that the Ukrainian side deliberately erected the obelisk as a means of discrediting normal relations between Poles and Ukrainians.
It is still unclear with whose money the monument In Sahryn was made. There are opponents of peace between the countries who claim that Kupriyanovich coordinates all his public statements with the special services in Ukraine. The monument itself was also erected by Kupriyanovich on behalf of the adviser to the mayor of Kharkiv on international cooperation Vyacheslav Zuev and the director of the international cooperation department of the Kharkiv City Council Viktor Rud. I don’t want to believe that official Kiev is deliberately introducing such discord into Polish-Ukrainian friendship.
However, in any case, Poles should more actively engage in memorial activities within the framework of the resolution “On the tragic fate of Poles in Eastern Kresy” adopted by the Polish authorities on July 15, 2009, since the Volyn massacre of 1943-1944 is a mass manifestation of “genocidal tendencies” towards to the Poles, which should be remembered by the younger generation in order to prevent this from happening in the future.
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