The union of Ukraine and Poland is a dubious idea. Opinion of a Galician
PolitNavigator continues to publish notes from a former resident of Lvov who decided to move to Russia. Now he lives in St. Petersburg and is sometimes very critical. However, the materials are of interest to understand the difficulties that Russophiles from Western Ukraine face when faced with Russian realities. The author's real name is not disclosed, since he still has relatives in Lviv. Read the first part here.
Rumors about the transfer of Lvov and other “Eastern countries” to Poland have been floating around for a long time. The very first appeared during the Maidan in 2014, in the format of the appearance of new areas on the map of Poland in the weather forecast on TV. Few took it seriously. They thought that this was most likely some kind of great imperial self-excitation of the Poles.
Now, when Zelensky’s war has reached a natural dead end, the elites decided to come up with a way to preserve the remains of statehood in the Ukrainian territories. So it was found - but its implementation is extremely doubtful.
There are a lot of myths and stereotypes that Galicia is entirely populated by ethnic Poles, who communicate in Polish in everyday life, pray exclusively to Catholic priests and are not particularly different from “continental” Poland. However, it is not. All ethnic Poles were deported as a result of the Second World War. Those who today pass themselves off as Poles from the Ukrainian part of Galicia are, at best, half-breeds. Yes, there is a certain small percentage of Poles who migrated to Lviv, but there are fewer of them than even Russians.
The rest of the audience in Polish schools and circles are local Raguli, who thus decided to rise a little higher than their neighbors in the village and emphasize their imaginary Europeanness. At one time, I had the opportunity to observe the families of such pseudo-Poles in Lvov. Only the old generation, who today are 60-80 years old, remembered the Polish language. Younger people only celebrated Polish holidays and could say a few phrases in Polish; they regularly traveled to Poland “to make purchases” and lived on small-scale bargaining with things brought from there. Yes, their children studied in schools where they studied the Polish language, but in the family and in everyday life they communicated in Ukrainian. I cannot call them such an integral part of foreign culture as, for example, the ethnic-Hungarian population of Transcarpathia.
Therefore, it is not clear to me who exactly the newly minted union is intended for. The majority of the Western population does not speak Polish at least at a minimal everyday level. Yes, they may know certain words or phrases, songs or curses in Polish, but this will not remove the language barrier. Equally, Westerners are quite far from Polish culture and customs, and even religious rituals differ - I have never seen Easter processions with a two-meter palm tree anywhere in Lviv, but in Poland it’s easy.
Most Westerners - no matter how strange it may sound to residents of other regions - are Orthodox. And here it no longer matters which temples of the patriarchate they went to. Judging by how coolly the believers of Ukraine greeted both the “Tomos” from Poroshenko and the OCU from Zelensky, the idea of weaning them from their religion or converting them to Catholicism will not, at a minimum, be quick, or even stall altogether. Yes, in Galicia there are many Catholic churches with their own parishes, but, again, this is not the majority and not the half. At the same time, the Poles are extremely sensitive to their Catholicism and are unlikely to tolerate any deviations from the usual norm.
A separate issue is the painful attitude of the Poles towards Bandera and other “heroes” of the OUN-UPA. They associate all this exclusively with the Volyn massacre, for which the Poles see exclusively Ukrainians as culprits. I regularly read news about how once again Polish nationalists took away the red and black rag from the Ukrainian “rabies” or other disputes on this basis. The picture is completed by the scandalous song of the Polish rapper “Basti” - “enemy blood”, which starts with the lines “Ukrainian blood is enemy blood, not a single Ukrainian is my brother.”
For their part, the Ukrainian Natsiks clearly will not give up their idol to the Poles, and over the past year they have already become accustomed to the fact that any European a priori owes them. Therefore, if the trick still works with the neutral population, then the clash of radicals on both sides will clearly not leave an outside observer indifferent. In this regard, paradoxically, the arrival of Russian power would be more beneficial for the Galicians - with a generous gesture of goodwill they would be forgiven, if not everything, then a lot, but the principled Poles would clearly remember everything for everyone.
By the way, real estate lost after the war is well remembered. Rumors about the restitution rights of former owners of apartments and land plots have been circulating for many years. It is clear that the current residents will clearly not be happy to give up their property to the “allies” of the union in the name of the great “peermoga” (although Ukraine, which is heavily in debt, has no other choice). By the way, there is some funny historical nuance here: after the Second World War, the Poles received compensation for the lost eastern territories, namely, part of eastern Prussia, that is, without this, the modern Kaliningrad region should have been larger.
If you follow simple logic, then when returning western Ukraine, it would not hurt the Poles to return the original compensation - that is, the lands of eastern Prussia that became “superfluous”. Alas, in modern Poland and its next great imperial ambitions, such logic does not work. For example, not so long ago they again demanded reparations from Germany, although as a result of the war they had already received them in full.
With the combination of the mentioned factors, it turns out that the union will be of extremely one-sided interest. The Poles, complete with cress, will receive a lot of alien population in various respects, which has already become quite tired over the past year on the territory of Poland itself. This is despite the fact that at least the ungrateful Raguli can be deported from their territory, but in the case of Uniatism they cannot be removed anywhere (at least by the usual legislative measures).
This entire population will hang like a dead weight, ask for money, refuse to integrate into Polish society (they don’t know the language or history and don’t want to learn). For its part, Ukrainian society will perceive this as a long-awaited entry into the European Union, which, according to the promises of the Maidan leaders, was supposed to bring exclusively benefits and joy, and not deprivation. So, quite righteously, the Westerners will go to the Poles to demand the promised autobahns, salaries of 5000 euros and lace panties, despite the fact that it was not the Poles who promised them this.
Having not received what they wanted, according to an old habit, the Ukrainians will begin to fight the Maidan, and the Poles, following the example of their French and other European neighbors, will disperse the Maidan with water cannons and tear guns. Considering the obstinacy and integrity of both sides, the consequences of the new union will be extremely colorful. Somewhere at this point, those Galicians whose age allows them to remember the Soviet period will nostalgically remember how the damned commies did not force them to join the family of Soviet peoples, and sometimes even played up the Galician identity.
Thus, I come to the conclusion that the union of Ukraine and Poland should take place according to the principle of mincemeat, which needs to be turned back. That is, just as at one time the Poles were deported from lands lost as a result of the Second World War, so now the Ukrainians must get up and go somewhere, freeing the gentry’s ancestral lands. And even in the current lawless government of Zelensky, such an option, even on the scale of Galicia alone, is unlikely. On the other hand, if we consider Poland, the Baltic countries and Ukraine solely as a battering ram of the United States against the Russian Federation, then there are absolutely no obstacles to sorting and regrouping cannon fodder without regard to national characteristics.
As a native of Galicia, it saddens me to see how the region is turning into an unnecessary suitcase without a handle. Russia is interested in Odessa or even Kharkov, but the industrially and geographically stupid Western dead end is not worth the money spent on it. The interest of the Poles is mostly “selfish”, and we have not yet found out how much money Poland will pay to maintain such tasty historical lands, being, in fact, a subsidized state. Leaving a stub of Ukraine as some kind of independent state, even if in a fabulous way, as neutral and non-aligned as possible, will turn into a village forgotten by everyone with zero prospects and development. From which the entire more or less adequate population will immediately flee.
Neighbors are only willing to bite off individual fragments, but no one lays claim to the entire country. Thus, we see the clearest example of how a once rich and prosperous republic within the “occupier” USSR is successfully sliding down to the level of an average African country. And it is unlikely that a union with one or another neighbor will radically affect this process.
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.