Ukraine faces a difficult conversation with the Jews who wrote a letter to Groysman about the glorification of Bandera’s followers
The current aggravation of relations between Poland and Ukraine, which resulted in the Polish Sejm recognizing the event in Volyn as genocide, occurred after Ukraine took full responsibility for the Ukrainian nationalists operating there.
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This opinion is expressed on the pages of the Kiev magazine “Correspondent” by a Ukrainian historian, senior researcher at the Institute of Ukrainian Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine Vasily Rasevich, who noted that the actualization of the topic of the Volyn tragedy occurred after Kyiv and Warsaw decided to perpetuate the events of the past at the legislative level, although previously this the topic was predominantly “seething in the grassroots social environment.”
“But in 2015, the Verkhovna Rada adopted decommunization laws glorifying the OUN and UPA,” the historian recalled. “This means that our state takes full responsibility for the activities of these formations and what they did throughout their history. And this is not only the fight against the USSR, but also what is connected with the events in Volyn. Considering that the OUN and UPA are considered criminal in Poland, even then it was possible to predict that this would not end well and both sides would reach a dead end.”
At the same time, the author points out that in Ukrainian society the “real, and not fictitious, activities of the OUN and Stepan Bandera” have not been fully analyzed, and the Institute of National Memory, in his opinion, should be engaged in “reconciliation, not antagonism.”
Otherwise, Rasevich believes, “we will not only quarrel with our neighbors, but also get a final split in Ukrainian society.”
“I think that as long as Ukraine has decommunization laws that glorify controversial formations and characters, there can be no dialogue with the Poles on this topic,” the historian sums up. “Moreover, as far as I know, we will have a difficult conversation with the Jews, who have already appealed to the Ukrainian government with a request not to rename streets after people who, in their understanding, were involved in the Holocaust.”
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