Poles Not As Gung-Ho On Ukraine As Their Warsaw Leaders

I also heard in plenty of conversations that Poland is the only ally of Ukraine to provide military hardware free of charge – whereas other NATO states insist on full payment or offer credits that will theoretically have to be repaid one day.

The resentments run deep and they affect large sections of the population. Why do I have to wait months for my hospital appointment, people ask – is it because of increased demand for health services from the millions of Ukrainian refugees?

Why should my taxes pay for generous financial grants to Ukrainians who turn up at the border, claim the cash, and promptly return home?

Most educated citizens dismiss such allegations with scorn. Those who complain and exaggerate isolated abuses are often written off as gullible victims of Russian propaganda. But Poles are unlikely dupes.

Monuments to communist crimes are everywhere – above all the Katyń massacres of 1940, when the Soviet security forces murdered thousands of Polish officers. More recently, many Poles still suspect the Kremlin's complicity in the plane crash that killed their then-president, Lech Kaczyński, in Smolensk in 2010.

Yet hatred of Russia does not translate into unconditional support for Ukraine. The enduring reason for friction between the two states has to do with diverging interpretations of violence that took place during and after the Second World War.

Ukrainian ministers have the undiplomatic habit of pointing out that large areas of present-day Poland were formerly occupied by Ukrainians . According to the historical ethno-linguistic and religious criteria generally considered central in the formation of peoples, Ukraine might indeed have a stronger claim to sections of the Polish Carpathians than it has to Crimea or Donbas.

Does this help explain why the Polish government upholds the sanctity of Ukraine's border with Russia? They want Ukraine's border with their country to be equally sacrosanct.

The typical Polish response to Ukrainian nationalist goading is to point out that Poles used to form the majority in most towns of western Ukraine – and that Lviv itself was a Polish city until Stalin redrew the borders in 1944 and the Polish population was deported westwards. These eastern borderlands are known to Poles as the Kresy .

They are the focus of strong emotions and mythology. The Kresy is imagined as a harmonious realm in which, for many centuries, cultivated Poles ruled benignly over all other nationalities.

This multiculturalism came to an abrupt end in the 1940s. These days, Poles with family roots in Volhynia and Galicia, much of which is now in western Ukraine, are incensed by Kyiv's refusal to admit that Ukrainian nationalists were responsible for the ethnic cleansing of the Polish population.

Poland's prime minister, Donald Tusk, recently made it clear that Poland's continued support for admitting Ukraine to the EU will depend on coming to terms with this dark past.

During my recent visit, I was sometimes asked why the BBC and other influential Western media never probed behind the slick public face of Volodymyr Zelensky's team to report on the real conditions and opinions of ordinary Ukrainians. Instead, Russians are demonized and Ukrainians hailed for their“European values” and their sacrifices on behalf of the West.

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Coverage in Polish state media conveys a similar message – but I found many citizens have become skeptical. There is pity for conscripts, sorrow for the loss of young lives on both sides and fear for where all this dehumanising violence is leading. But few of the people I spoke with believed that Russians are the only party violating the Geneva Conventions.

Often, the conversation turned to Boris Johnson. I was asked to explain why the then-prime minister advised Zelensky in April 2022 that Ukraine should continue the fighting. Did Johnson, as has often been rumored, sabotage proposals for a negotiated peace carefully drawn up in Istanbul shortly before his visit?

Was it the spontaneous whim of a Western politician who knew nothing about regional history, a clown playing macho games with Zelensky for the sake of his own image? Did he not care at all about the hundreds of thousands who would suffer and die if this war continued? Was he pursuing a devious strategy agreed with EU leaders and NATO partners, above all Washington?

I did not have answers to any of these questions.

Chris Hann is emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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