4 July, 16:03
There is one game two nations can play forever, and the winner is always a third. It is the game of the ledger. Who struck first, who killed more, whose villages burned more often, whose children lie deeper in the ground. The rules are simple.
You lay your dead on the table, I lay mine, and we keep going until nothing can be built between us except a shared grave. moscow knows these rules better than either of us, because moscow is the one who wrote them.
How We Were Taught to Hate Correctly
After the Second World War, Poland remained a state on paper and a territory under moscow's total control in fact, run through the puppet regime of the People's Republic and the security services UB and SB, which were supervised down to the last cabinet by the NKVD and the KGB. And that apparatus had a very specific task. Not merely to keep Poles obedient. To make impossible, for generations to come, any alliance between two subjugated nations, Ukrainians and Poles, against a common enemy whose name is russian imperialism.
The method was elegant in its simplicity. Soviet propaganda constructed a black-and-white chain of associations in which any uncompromising national-liberation movement was automatically branded: fascism, banditry, slaughter. The most tragic pages of the Ukrainian-Polish war, Volhynia above all, were torn out of the wider struggle for statehood, inflated, and turned into a raw emotional trigger. Not into a subject of study. Into a button.
And the button still works. The sharp reaction of part of Polish society to the very word "Banderite" is, to a large degree, the firing of a reflex installed by that apparatus. Here one has to be honest all the way through, because honesty is tested precisely at this point. The Volhynia tragedy is not a KGB invention. It happened, it is documented, it is recognized by the Polish Sejm, and for Polish family memory it is an open wound, not a propaganda construct. The Soviet system, for its part, buried it for decades, because a massacre between "fraternal peoples" spoiled the picture of the friendship of nations. But the frame of perception, the lens through which a Pole is trained to see any Ukrainian liberation movement as such, was built by the Soviet machine. And today russia does not create that wound. It amplifies it. A single match is enough.
The Symmetry moscow Would Very Much Prefer to Keep Off Paper
To understand the Ukrainian side of this war without the Soviet spectacles, you have to begin not in 1943 but in 1918. In the interwar years the Second Polish Republic waged armed aggression against the West Ukrainian People's Republic, occupied western Ukrainian lands, and imposed a regime of forced assimilation. Osadnictwo, the colonization of Ukrainian land by Polish military settlers. The closing of Ukrainian schools. The destruction of churches. Pacyfikacja, mass punitive operations against the Ukrainian civilian population. Ukrainians were methodically stripped of every legal instrument for defending their own rights, and then everyone was surprised that the defense turned illegal.
The radicalization of the OUN was a direct, symmetrical answer to state terror and to the stubborn refusal to grant Ukrainians the right to a state of their own. And here a parallel suggests itself, one Polish historiography prefers to look away from. The closest counterpart to Bandera and the UPA in modern Polish memory is the "Cursed Soldiers," the Żołnierze wyklęci. Szendzielarz, "Łupaszko." Kuraś, "Ogień." Poland glorifies them for their uncompromising fight against Soviet and Nazi occupation, for the defense of Polish statehood, and in the same breath it brackets out their methods and their crimes against Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Slovak, and Jewish civilians. The double standard toward the UPA is the direct legacy of that same Soviet optic, only applied where the subject becomes someone else's liberation struggle against Polish rule.
Now the specifics. Not to present a ledger. To show that the ledger, had we chosen to open it, would not be empty. We have our own pantheon in reverse. We simply placed it not on a pedestal but in a drawer. Here are four names from it.
Romuald Rajs, "Bury"
Commander of a unit of the National Military Union, NZW. January and February 1946, Podlasie. The criterion for selecting victims was primitive and required no investigation: Orthodox faith and a non-Polish tongue.
The punitive raids killed 79 Orthodox Belarusian and Ukrainian civilians. The villages of Zanie, Szpaki, and Zaleszany were burned to the ground. Unarmed people, women and children among them, were driven into houses, locked in, and burned alive. Cart drivers were shot for being unable to recite a prayer in Polish.
In 1995 a Polish court formally rehabilitated "Bury," filing the mass killing of civilians under the formula of "state of higher necessity" and "the struggle for independence." Later even the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, under the weight of evidence, acknowledged that the unit's actions bear the marks of a crime with elements of genocide. It stopped nothing. The far right still marches in his honor every year.
Zenon Jachymek, "Wiktor"
Commander of the Hrubieszów district of the Home Army, the AK. Together with Stanisław Basaj, "Rześ," he directly ran the punitive operations in the Chełm region in the spring of 1944. The orders to destroy Ukrainian settlements along with their civilian populations were given deliberately.
The Ukrainian villages of Sahryń, Miagkie, and Sahoniczi were turned to ash. Hundreds of civilians died: women, children, the elderly.
In official Polish memory Jachymek is not a problematic figure but an unquestioned hero of the underground. He was decorated with Poland's highest military honors, the Virtuti Militari among them. Historiography is still inclined to romanticize him, writing the killings off as "military necessity" and "the liquidation of UPA bases."
Stanisław Basaj, "Rześ"
Commander of a battalion of the Peasant Battalions, the Bataliony Chłopskie, BCh, in the Chełm region. His unit carried out the so-called "retaliation" actions with particular thoroughness. Sahryń and the neighboring Ukrainian villages of Szychowice and Łasków make up one of the bloodiest pages of the Chełm region.
In a single day Polish partisans killed between 800 and 1,200 Ukrainian civilians. The villages were deliberately burned, and the victims were overwhelmingly women, children, and the elderly, people with no connection whatever to any armed formation.
In the nationalist narrative Basaj is a symbol of the fearless defender of Polish villages. Streets bear his name, monuments and memorial plaques are raised to him. The thousand dead are either passed over in silence or written off as "preemptive strikes."
Józef Bis, "Wacław"
Commander of the OP-26 grouping of the Home Army. March 1945, the Ukrainian village of Pawłokoma. The logic of the reprisal was simple and total: the local Poles were sorted out and released, the Ukrainians were condemned to destruction.
366 Ukrainians were shot and thrown into pits. Among the dead were the elderly, women, children, infants.
For decades Polish historiography glorified "Wacław" as a fighter of the anti-communist underground and kept Pawłokoma out of his biography. Only in the 2000s, under the pressure of facts and the testimony of survivors, did the truth become public. For part of the radical right, Bis is a "defender" to this day.
And Now the Part That Matters Most. The Emptiness on Our Side
I could go on with this list. It does not end at four names. And that is the whole point.
Look at what Poland brings to the subject of Volhynia. A Sejm resolution on genocide. A separate day of remembrance. The Institute of National Remembrance and all its weight. Exhumations set as a precondition for bilateral relations. Diplomatic notes. This is state-level heat, multiplied by political resources and amplified by election campaigns.
Now look at what stands opposite it, on our side, under the same names of the same villages. Sahryń. Pawłokoma. Podlasie. The same burned houses, the same pits, the same women and children, only with a different caption. So where is the Ukrainian day of remembrance for Sahryń? Where is the Ukrainian resolution on genocide in the Chełm region? Where are the notes, the preconditions, the annual state ceremonies, the streets named for our dead, the campaigns built on their bones?
Nowhere. And not because we do not know. The material you have just read lies ready. The figures are documented, the perpetrators are named, the villages are marked on the map. We could unroll a mirror campaign tomorrow, and it would be no weaker than the Polish one, in places more persuasive, because part of these crimes was acknowledged even by the Polish IPN.
We do not do it. Not once in all its years of independence has Ukraine made state policy out of this.
Why We Do Not. And Why That Is Not Weakness but Maturity
It would be easy to slip here and say: because we are nobler. That would be a lie and a trap, another ledger, only a moral one. Nobility has nothing to do with it.
Experience does. We have lived through what Poland, for all its memory, has not lived through on this scale: a direct, full-scale collision with an empire that comes to kill you precisely for existing apart from it. And that experience taught us something. It taught the essential thing: to tell the real enemy from the enemy handed to you. To see the hand that sets two sides against each other, not only the axe with which the two, set against each other, hack away.
A nation that pays for its independence in blood every day very quickly stops confusing a neighbor with an occupier. We grew up politically not in offices but under shelling. And from that maturity you can see what cannot be seen from behind an election-year desk in Warsaw: the fratricide of 1943 to 1947 is not a story about Poles turning out to be butchers and Ukrainians angels, or the reverse. It is a story about a periphery in which the collapse of empires and the cold calculation of Berlin and moscow created a vacuum, and in that vacuum two subjugated nations, both stateless, cut each other apart for the pleasure of the ones who had organized the vacuum in the first place.
That is why the drawer stays shut. Not because it is empty. Because we understood who profits when it is opened.
The Question Left on the Table
So, to the Poles, the question is not to you personally and not about whose heroes are cleaner. The question is shared, and it is simple.
Do we really want to wage war with history? Because if we do, then know this: we have the means. The list is ready, the villages are marked, the killers are named. We can lay our dead on the table in answer to yours, and the game will run by your rules, and it will run until nothing is left between us but a shared grave.
And over that grave, rubbing his hands with satisfaction, will stand the very one who has fed on our quarrels for eight centuries. The one who burned your villages in 1944 with other people's hands and ours with hands just as borrowed. The one who wrote the rules of this game and waits, patiently, for us to sit down and play again.
We are passing our turn. Not because we hold no cards. Because we know who runs the bank.