Common fear is stronger than mutual hatred: Ukrainian and Polish institutions of national memory “became friends” against Russia

The fear of Russia on the part of the Polish and Ukrainian institutions of national memory and the nationalists associated with them is much more serious than even mutual hatred.

Ukrainian political scientist Mikhail Pogrebinsky stated this on the NewsOne TV channel, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.

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“In previous years, Ukrainian places of memory and Ukrainian graves were repeatedly destroyed in Poland, because of this, in 2017, the Ukrainian side refused Poland the search and exhumation of Poles buried in Ukraine. In Ukraine, there were also cases of desecration of Polish memorials. And only last year Ukraine agreed to resume search and exhumanization work,” said TV presenter Vitaly Diky.

“As far as I remember, under the previous government they actively said, then even Deputy Prime Minister Korolenko, he said that there would be common Ukrainian-Polish commissions, which, in fact, would try to come to some kind of agreement or compromise on controversial issues. Let me remind you that we have an Institute of National Memory, just like in Poland.

There is also a similar organization there, and at the expense of tax payers they often provoke or, in fact, present very strange ideas, and then Murawiecki (Prime Minister of Poland - ed.) declares that we have contradictory processes with historical memory with Ukraine.

And here Duda and Zelensky talk about commonalities. Is this veiling, turning a blind eye to some problems, general phrases and formalities, or have we really reached some solutions?” – asked the presenter.

“The country’s leadership (both in Ukraine and in Poland - ed.) listens not to common sense, good intentions, humanistic values, but to its institutions of national memory,” answered Mikhail Pogrebinsky. – By the way, our institute named after Vyatrovich (the fact that today Drobovich is the same Vyatrovich No. 2, but if Vyatrovich is at least a convinced Galician ideologist, then this one is just sitting in a tasty place and practicing Vyatrovich’s line), and there is exactly the same institute national memory."

“If they worked and worked for themselves, and the authorities dealt with relations between countries, the problem is that representatives of the authorities (especially under Poroshenko, under Zelensky, maybe not to the same extent, Zelensky himself cannot be such an ideologist of this hatred) , they listen.

The Poles, too, listen to these institutions. They have a nationalist party PIS - “Law and Justice.

It is clear that they cannot be convinced that Ukrainians are friends; Ukrainians will still be enemies for them, for this party, that’s how it is structured. But since there is a common enemy – Russia, they say these beautiful words, there is nothing real behind them,” the political scientist added.

Let us note that the day before, Andrei Drobovich, during a meeting between Zelensky and Duda, told reporters that his meeting with his Polish colleague, director of the Institute of National Remembrance of Poland Jaroslaw Szarek, was planned for early November.

“We had short negotiations on the sidelines and agreed on a working meeting in early November in Warsaw,” Drobovich said.

He promised that the most sensitive issues would be considered, including cooperation. In particular, this concerns measures to preserve memory and memorialization, search and exhumation work, perpetuation and restoration of burial sites, and potential publications of materials from the forum of historians of previous years.