Poland suddenly scolds Ukraine, what’s up?

Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – Polish government says it will issue a warning to its neighbors who are at war with Russia, Ukraine. This is related to the country’s award to one of its heroes who was a Nazi collaborator in WWII.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Warsaw would remind Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal that glorifying Stepan Bandera is unacceptable.

This comes a day after the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, posted information about Bandera’s birthday on its official Twitter page.

Asked to comment on the situation, Morawiecki said Warsaw has been highly critical of any praise or even mention of Bandera. Poland, he said, viewed it negatively.

“In my first conversation with Shmyhal, I will convey this very, very clearly. The Verkhovna Rada remembers a person who was an ideologue in the criminal era,” Morawiecki said, quoted Al MayadeenTuesday (3/1/2023).

Bandera was a Ukrainian nationalist leader who collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II and was responsible for mass atrocities against civilians as the leader of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).

The UPA mainly operated in western Ukraine and fought Soviet forces in cooperation with Nazi Germany. The UPA committed many crimes, including the Volhynia massacre, the mass murder of the Polish population living in Volhynia and Galicia in 1943.

Polish historians consider the massacre to be genocide and ethnic cleansing, which claimed the lives of up to 130,000 people.

In the 1930s, Bandera joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a union between radical nationalists and far-right organizations, including the Union of Ukrainian Fascists.

The OUN initiated a campaign of terror in Poland, including the assassination of prominent Polish politicians, such as Interior Minister Bronislaw Pieracki, as well as Polish and Ukrainian moderates, such as Tadeusz Holowko.

Meanwhile, Russia itself has argued that its military attack on Ukraine this time was to eliminate all forms of Nazi ideology in that country. Russian President Vladimir Putin has also described the atrocities of persecution by Ukrainian ultranationalists against ethnic Russians in the country.

[Gambas:Video CNBC]