The current and very public discourse between Poland and Ukraine over a military unit named after “heroes of the UPA” has produced the diplomatic equivalent of a playground meltdown with medals revoked, medals returned, statements issued, and nationalist commentators on both sides discovering new reserves of outrage calibrated primarily for domestic audiences. Meanwhile, in Moscow, someone is watching with the utmost pleasure.
I want to be direct about where I stand, because the question of credibility matters in arguments like this one. I think I’ve made my position regarding Ukraine’s sovereignty and the distinct horror of the Russian state, so I trust that this won’t result in smooth-brained retorts of “OK RUZZIAN!” from people with Shiba Inu profile pictures. Or at least I certainly hope not. But I find the glorification of OUN-UPA ideology genuinely objectionable, not because Russian state media says so, and not because Polish nationalists say so, but because the historical record is clear and I believe in consistent standards.
I have read the correspondence between OUN and UPA members translated from Ukrainian and I have read more books than I’d like to admit on the topic. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists was not “adjacent to fascism” or “shaped by the currents of its era.” It was explicitly, self-declaredly fascist. In April 1939, OUN’s Second Great Assembly introduced the position of Vozhd’ who would rule as dictator during the war of liberation and head of state thereafter, in a new mono-ethnic Ukraine that would prohibit political parties and control its press. Melnyk himself wrote to Ribbentrop that OUN was “related in world outlook to the same type of movements of Europe, in particular to national socialism in Germany and fascism in Italy.” Both factions of OUN participated in the Holocaust. The UPA carried out the systematic killing of between 50,000 and 100,000 Polish civilians in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943–45. These are not contested facts when it comes to observable historical record.
None of this is a judgment on Ukrainians, or at least it absolutely shouldn’t be. After all, the loudest people in the west smugly using this historical record as a means to justify their total lack of empathy for a people facing annihilation seem to forget they too come from countries with a bloody, reprehensible past. And yet they still insist their opinions count, regardless of the crimes of their ancestors. The millions of Ukrainians defending their right to survive on their own terms against Russian terrorism have nothing to do with Bandera or Melnyk or other long-dead fascists. They are fighting because Bucha happened, because Mariupol was besieged into surrender and then erased, because Russian missiles have hit maternity hospitals and train stations and markets full of people, and because Ukraine is a country with a right to exist, and without Rusky mir breathing down its neck. And they deserve better symbols. The conflation of Ukrainian national identity with OUN-UPA is itself an OUN-UPA project, one the historian John-Paul Himka has described as the increasing “OUNization” of Ukrainian public memory. The reburial of Andriy Melnyk in the National Military Memorial Cemetery outside Kyiv with a coffin lying in state at the Greek Catholic Patriarchal Cathedral, ceremonial honors, and with plans underway to bring Konovalets from Rotterdam to join him is a choice being made in the present, not a decree from the past. Ukraine has better heroes than this: better political thinkers, better writers, better soldiers, better people in general who died for Ukrainian dignity without having first organized the liquidation of their neighbors and fellow Ukrainians.
The scale and brutality of Volhynia is not in dispute, and the demand that Ukrainians come to terms with it is not inherently illegitimate. Tens of thousands of Polish civilians were killed by UPA in a campaign that was organized, systematic, and ethnically targeted. That history carries genuine weight, and confronting its implications is warranted. Ukrainian attempts to deflect by equating Armia Krajowa with UPA do not help. The AK was the armed wing of the Polish government-in-exile and a central component of the anti-Nazi underground. Treating it as morally equivalent to a force conducting ethnic cleansing is its own historical distortion, and it registers as exactly the insult it appears to be.
But I have to be equally direct about what’s happening on the Polish side of this argument, because the loudest voices there are not as interested in historical justice as they are in leverage.
What genuine bilateral accountability would actually require is acknowledging what preceded it. The interwar Polish state’s treatment of its Ukrainian minority was not a neutral background condition. The 1930 Pacification of Eastern Galicia, in which Polish military and police units conducted punitive raids on Ukrainian villages, burned property, beat residents, and destroyed community organizations was carried out with deliberate brutality. Ukrainian-language schools were systematically closed or converted to Polish instruction. Orthodox churches were demolished or seized. Polonization as official policy was not a marginal tendency but a project of the Polish state, aimed at the cultural erasure of populations that had inhabited the region for centuries. The OUN emerged from this context, and its radicalization did not require Russian invention or German funding to find a constituency. It found one because the people it recruited had direct experience of a state that treated their language, religion, and political existence as threats to be suppressed.
None of this is vindication. An organized campaign of ethnic massacre is not a proportionate political response to administrative repression, and the historical record of what happened in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia between 1943 and 1945 does not change because its preconditions were real. But context and exculpation are different categories, and a demand for historical accountability that begins in 1943 and treats everything before it as irrelevant is not accountability.
And what Polish nationalist discourse is actually doing is something else entirely. The parliamentary right, the IPN in its more maximalist configurations, and the Polish far right commentariat that has found in Ukrainian wartime atrocities a convenient counterweight to any expectation of Polish self-examination are not engaged in historical accountability. They are engaged in a blocking operation. The demand that Ukraine formally acknowledge Volhynia as genocide before receiving Polish solidarity is not moral or righteous. It’s a thinly veiled political instrument, and its instrumentalization should be named as such. Returning medals is spectacle designed to feel like reckoning while accomplishing nothing except signaling to a domestic audience that someone is being “tough.” If this were genuine historical accountability, the argument might look different. It might look like a bilateral process, historians and survivors and representatives of both states sitting with the evidence together. Instead it looks like competitive victimhood weaponized to serve exactly the interests it claims to oppose, and with distinct ignorance of the fact that one party is being bombed daily.
And Russia is not the passive beneficiary of this argument. It’s an active investor in it. Moscow has spent years amplifying the Volhynia issue, and not because Russian leadership has ever demonstrated any sincere concern for Polish victims of Ukrainian nationalists, but because Polish-Ukrainian friction is strategically useful. Every news cycle consumed by this dispute is a news cycle not consumed by the thousands of kidnapped Ukrainian children, the civillans suffering from PTSD after experiencing nightly bombing campaigns, and the systematic Russian destruction of Ukrainian life. Every diplomatic rupture between Warsaw and Kyiv weakens the coalition that Russia aims to defeat. The childishness of the medal-returning gesture is a gift, freely given and gratefully received. The fact that the underlying historical grievances are genuine rather than manufactured is entirely irrelevant to their current function: they are ammunition, and they are being used as ammunition, and everyone involved in the performance is complicit.
What makes this harder to navigate honestly is that the broader disease is not uniquely Ukrainian or Polish. It’s regional, and we need to be honest about it.
The countries of Central and Eastern Europe have developed sophisticated frameworks for narrating victimhood, whether it’s under Nazism, Stalinism, or Russian occupation, while maintaining carefully managed silences around their own historical participation in other crimes. This is a structural feature of how nationalism operates, because nationalism’s primary function is to produce a story in which one’s own nation is the shining superior, the suffering subject, and the one true righteous victim and hero, while everyone and everything else is context.
The Czech Republic offers an instructive current example. The recent controversy around the Sudeten conference in Brno concerns the postwar expulsion of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia under the Beneš decrees, a process in which somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 people died and roughly two and a half million were forcibly removed from land their communities had inhabited for centuries. The controversy is genuinely complicated. The Sudeten German population had voted overwhelmingly for the Nazi-aligned Sudeten German Party in 1935, provided the political pretext for Hitler’s annexation of the region in 1938, and benefited materially from the subsequent occupation of Czech lands. Czech collaboration with the Nazi administration is also part of this history, not an exculpatory footnote to it.
What the defensive responses to the conference tend to leave out is the problem that collective guilt creates by definition: it cannot distinguish between the perpetrator and the neighbor who sheltered Jews, between the enthusiastic collaborator and the person who voted the wrong way in 1935 and spent the war years keeping their head down. Bohdan Sláma’s 2020 film Krajina ve stínu covers this topic well. Set across a Moravian border village from the late 1930s through the postwar years, it follows characters who inhabited the same ethnic category but entirely different moral positions, and shows how the machinery of collective punishment consumed them without distinction. The Sudeten German who resisted, who protected, who had no hand in what was done in the name of his ethnicity, ended up in the same cattle car as the man who did.
The stubborn rebuttals the conference produced were predictable: whatever was done was done in the shadow of occupation, the victims were not innocent,or to mourn them is to relitigate the war on the wrong side. These arguments are a remarkably effective way to avoid honest discussion entirely.
What the Czech state did to Czech Roma women across multiple decades has no comparable ambiguity. A campaign of forced sterilizations carried out by Czech doctors in Czech hospitals with Czech state sanction continued well past the Velvet Revolution. This was not the legacy of Nazi occupation. This was a post-communist democracy practicing eugenics against its own citizens, in living memory, and meaningful financial compensation to surviving victims took decades to extract from a government that offered reluctance where accountability was owed. The Czech Republic’s engagement with that chapter has been slow, grudging, and incomplete in ways that sit uncomfortably alongside its confidence in pointing to other countries’ moral failures.
The pattern repeats throughout the region. Hungary has constructed an elaborate victim narrative around Trianon and Soviet occupation that leaves almost no oxygen for honest engagement with Hungarian participation in the deportation of Jews. Slovakia has its own complicated silence around the wartime Slovak State which operated as a fascist puppet regime. Romania has Antonescu. The list is long and the mechanism is consistent: nationalist politics selects the version of the past most useful for present purposes and defends it with the tenacity usually reserved for people who know the facts are not entirely on their side.
There is a sovereignty argument that gets made here, and it deserves engagement rather than automatic dismissal. Countries do have the right to determine their own historical narratives, to decide whom to honor, and to construct the stories they tell themselves about who they are. But sovereignty over memory does not operate in a vacuum, and nowhere less so than in this region, where the histories of nations are not parallel tracks but the same track, occupied by different people at different moments, each generating its own account of the same violence. The hero of one nation’s liberation story is frequently the executioner (or collaborated with the executioner) of another nation’s civilians. These categories do not dissolve because a state has decided which side of the ledger it prefers to read, and history does not become a purely internal matter simply because it’s declared one. When the history in question is shared, the people on the other side of it retain a legitimate interest in how it’s told and the right to object to the glorification of figures who caused them harm. The cases mentioned above are not separate failures of different countries with different problems. They are the same refusal, recurring under different flags, and together they are feeding something considerably larger than any of them individually.
The UPA glorification in Kyiv, the medal-returning in Warsaw, the Sudeten defensiveness in Brno: all of it is feeding the same larger problem. The resurgence of an ethnically-inflected, grievance-organized, historically-selective far right is now a continent-wide phenomenon, gaining legislative power in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and well beyond. Its primary raw material is the sense that a nation’s authentic historical experience has been suppressed or distorted, that the real victims are being denied recognition, and that the real heroes have been maligned. Nationalism produces this feeling reliably, in any country, from any historical material. Russia did not create this tendency in Europe, but it’s certainly taking advantage of it.
The answer is not to pretend history is irrelevant or that all national narratives are so equally flawed that accurate record becomes impossible. History matters enormously, which is precisely why the fight over it is so fierce. But there is a meaningful difference between reckoning with history and weaponizing it.
Reckoning involves sitting with uncomfortable facts about your own community. It involves acknowledging that the same nation that produced figures worthy of genuine honor also produced figures who should be examined honestly rather than enshrined. It involves distinguishing between honoring the real sacrifices people made and endorsing the ideological frameworks under which those sacrifices were organized. Weaponizing involves none of this. It selects the most politically convenient version of the past and defending it against all incoming complexity.
The pattern holds across this part of the world, and pretending otherwise requires more effort than honesty permits. None of this is equivalent to what Russia is doing, and the distinction matters and should be stated plainly. Russia’s historical revisionism is not a political tendency or a generational argument among historians. It’s a state project and policy, decades in the making, and embedded in school curricula that teach children the Holodomor was not a specific crime against Ukrainians, that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was defensive pragmatism (or it gets left out entirely), and that Soviet deportations of entire peoples were wartime necessity. It runs through state media, through credentialed institutions, and through the vocabulary ordinary Russians reach for when asked about their neighbors. It is the ideological infrastructure of a live war of extermination. Wars of this kind require a prior war on memory, and Russia has been fighting that one for decades.
The difference between Russia and the CEE cases is not that Russia practices historical revisionism and CEE countries do not. They all do. The difference is that Russia does it in service of active territorial conquest and mass atrocity, while CEE countries do it in service of political comfort and nationalist back-patting. That distinction is real and it matters enormously, but it does not make the underlying mechanism different. A country that selectively memory-holes its own crimes while demanding historical accountability from its neighbors is not making a moral argument. It’s objectively hypocritical to condemn Moscow’s relationship to historical truth from a position of managed amnesia. The standard either applies or it doesn’t, and deciding it only applies to your enemies is precisely what Russia does.
It’s also precisely how Russian propaganda sustains itself. The Kremlin does not invent these contradictions or dark historical facts. It finds them already there, already defended, and already surrounded by the kind of stubborn mythological protection that makes honest engagement impossible. Every indefensible figure kept on a pedestal, every atrocity explained away rather than condemned, and every demand for nuance that functions in practice as a demand for silence is raw material the Kremlin could not manufacture on its own. The defense against that exploitation is to stop defending the indefensible. Engaging in intellectual honesty about one’s own historical record gives propaganda nothing to grip.
If this region wants a future genuinely distinct from the authoritarian nationalism currently spreading across Europe, it might start by interrogating blind nationalism itself rather than simply trying to practice a more personally palatable version of it. The nation is not a person. It does not have a soul to redeem or a conscience to awaken. What it has is a state apparatus, an official memory policy, and a political class with strong incentives to manage both. When we talk about national reckoning, we are almost always talking about states deciding what version of their own crimes is tolerable enough to acknowledge without disturbing existing arrangements of power.
History cannot be changed. The dead cannot be brought back, and no living person fighting for their survival today bears personal responsibility for what was done in their nation’s name before they were born. The question is whether the political framework of nationalism is even capable of producing the honest accounting it claims to offer, or whether it will always subordinate that accounting to the project of national cohesion. The evidence suggests the latter. A nationalism that confronts its own crimes honestly is a nationalism sawing at its own foundations, and they rarely do it for long. Russia’s political culture is the logical endpoint of a project that every nationalist tradition shares: the transformation of history into mythology in service of the present to be used as an alibi. The alternative being demanded here is not a better form of nationalism, but the willingness to put down the mythology entirely, which is a different and more difficult thing, but must eventually happen.
radical dumpling: screaming into the void about anti-fascism and anti-imperial consistency, from somewhere between east and west.
This article originally appeared on the author’s Substack.
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