The Ghosts of Volhynia and Europe’s Unfinished Past

A diplomatic row over a wartime nationalist force exposes centuries of contested memory between Poland and Ukraine.

Memorials to the victims of Volhynia remain central to Polish historical memory.

“How can I live in this country / Where the foot knocks against / The unburied bones of kin?” Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz asked in his 1945 poem In Warsaw.

Writing amid the ruins of a continent devastated by war, Miłosz captured a transcendental truth about Eastern Europe, where the dead rarely remain confined to the past. They continue to linger in memory and politics. The latest quarrel between Poland and Ukraine began with the resurrection of a dead army.

When President Volodymyr Zelensky granted a Ukrainian military unit the honorary title “Heroes of the UPA,” he revived dark memories of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a nationalist guerrilla force that fought during and after the Second World War and remains one of the most contested symbols in Polish-Ukrainian history.

In response, Polish President Karol Nawrocki revoked the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state decoration, which had been awarded to Zelensky in 2023. Ukrainian officials returned Polish honours in protest. Suddenly, two allies who had until recently been united by their opposition to Putin’s Russia found themselves arguing over events that had taken place more than eight decades earlier.

To many Ukrainians, the UPA represents a struggle for independence against both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. To many Poles, it evokes the horrific massacres of Volhynia - a historic region straddling the frontier between Poland and Ukraine - and Eastern Galicia, where tens of thousands of Polish civilians perished between 1943 and 1945.

Curse of the Borderlands

To understand why Volhynia remains so painful, one must travel back not just to the events of 1940s but nearly 500 years of competing memories along one of Europe's most contested frontiers.

The lands that today form western Ukraine were once part of one of Europe's largest states: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Created in 1569, the Commonwealth stretched from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea. Its eastern territories included vast Ruthenian (proto-Ukrainians) lands inhabited largely by Orthodox-speaking peasants who would later become Ukrainians. The Commonwealth’s political elite, however, was overwhelmingly Polish-speaking and Roman Catholic.

At its height in the 17th century, the Commonwealth covered much of present-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine - a vast multinational federation that occupied the space between Germany and Russia.

One reason Polish and Ukrainian memories collide so frequently is that they concern the same places. Consider Lviv, the largest city of western Ukraine. Depending on who ruled it, the city has been known as Lemberg under the Habsburgs, Lwów in Polish and Lviv in Ukrainian. Each name reflects a different chapter of the region’s history. To Poles, Lwów was a cherished cultural capital, home to universities, writers and some of the country's most important intellectual institutions. To Ukrainians, Lviv became the cradle of modern national consciousness. To Jews, it was one of Eastern Europe’s great centres of learning and commerce.

Another source of division was religion. The lands of western Ukraine occupied a civilisational frontier between Roman Catholic Europe and the Orthodox East. In 1596, the Union of Brest created what became known as the Greek Catholic (or Uniate) Church. Its followers recognised the authority of the Pope while retaining Eastern rites and traditions.

To many Polish rulers, the church offered a means of integrating the Commonwealth’s Orthodox subjects. To many Ukrainians, it became a vehicle for preserving a distinct identity between Poland and Russia.

Norman Davies, perhaps the most influential English-language historian of Poland, has described the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as one of Europe's most unusual political experiments. In ‘God’s Playground’ (1979), his classic study of Poland, Davies observes that the Commonwealth was a sprawling multinational state whose elected monarchy and powerful nobility distinguished it from the absolutist kingdoms emerging elsewhere on the continent. Yet what many Polish historians have celebrated as an era of political liberty appears very differently in Ukrainian nationalist memory.

To Serhii Plokhy, the Harvard historian of Ukraine, the same state also contained the seeds of future conflict. The Ruthenian inhabitants of its eastern territories -ancestors of modern Ukrainians - were never fully incorporated as equal partners in the Commonwealth’s political project.

For many Ukrainian nationalists, the memory of Polish domination became deeply embedded in Ukrainian historical consciousness. Religion deepened rather than erased the region’s ambiguities. The border between Poland and Ukraine was also a frontier between Rome and Byzantium, Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Latin and Cyrillic worlds.

The Cossack Revolt

Entrance of Bohdan Khmelnytskyi to Kyiv in 1649, by Mykola Ivasyuk.

The great turning point came in the seventeenth century with the Cossack revolt led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky. In 1648, Cossack armies and peasant rebels rose against Polish rule, unleashing a conflict whose brutality scarred the region. Polish nobles, Jews and Catholics became targets. The rebellion eventually brought Ukraine into Moscow’s orbit, laying foundations for centuries of Russian influence. To Poles, Khmelnytsky was a rebel who destroyed the Commonwealth's eastern frontier. To Ukrainians, he became a founding national hero.

The partitions of Poland in the late 18^th century complicated matters further. Most Ukrainian lands fell under Russian rule, while Galicia passed to the Austrian Habsburg Empire. Under Austria, Ukrainians enjoyed limited opportunities for cultural organisation and political participation. Under Russia, national expression was often restricted. Historians note that modern Ukrainian nationalism developed most vigorously in Austrian Galicia.

The 19th century witnessed the rise of nationalism across Europe. Both Poles and Ukrainians began imagining themselves as modern nations entitled to self-determination with the same territory being claimed by both.

The collapse of the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires after the First World War turned these competing dreams into armed conflict. In 1918, Polish and Ukrainian forces fought a bitter war over Lviv and Eastern Galicia where Poland emerged victorious. Millions of Ukrainians consequently found themselves citizens of the newly restored Polish Republic.

For many Ukrainians, the interwar Polish state became another chapter in a familiar story of domination. Warsaw pursued policies that Ukrainians viewed as discriminatory. Schools were ‘Polonised,’ land reforms favoured Polish settlers in some areas and Ukrainian political aspirations were stifled.

This period produced a new generation of Ukrainian nationalist thinkers, among whom the most influential was Dmytro Dontsov, a journalist and uncompromising political theorist. Inspired by the authoritarian currents then sweeping Europe, Dontsov called for a disciplined, militant nationalism willing to use force in pursuit of national liberation. His ideas profoundly influenced younger activists and

led to Ukrainian militant nationalism gaining ground, particularly in Galicia.

The Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), founded in 1929, embraced revolutionary methods, assassinations and an uncompromising vision of national struggle.

The OUN’s ideology was shaped by the darker currents of interwar Europe. It admired authoritarianism, glorified violence and believed national survival required ruthless action. Among its most influential leaders was Stepan Bandera, whose name remains controversial even today. To many Ukrainians, Bandera symbolises resistance to foreign domination. To Poles and Jews, he represents a far more troubling legacy of collaboration with Nazi Germany and ethnic violence.

Havoc in the Bloodlands

The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 destroyed the Polish state. While Hitler’s forces attacked Poland in the west, Soviet forces occupied eastern Poland, including western Ukraine. In June 1941, Hitler scuppered the pact as Germany invaded its erstwhile ‘ally’ - the Soviet Union. The region descended into a nightmare of overlapping occupations, ethnic violence and competing national projects.

It was in this chaos that the Ukrainian Insurgent Army emerged. Founded in 1942, the UPA sought an independent Ukraine. Its most infamous actions occurred in Volhynia on what Poles remember as “Bloody Sunday” in July 1943, when entire communities were exterminated by the UPA in one of the most horrific episodes of ethnic violence in modern European history.

Stepan Bandera

Polish historian Grzegorz Motyka, whose landmark 2011 study, Od rzezi wołyńskiej do akcji “Wisła” (From the Volhynian Massacre to Operation Vistula), traces the entire arc of Polish-Ukrainian violence from the massacres of 1943 to the forced resettlement of Ukrainians by the Polish communist authorities in 1947. Motyka estimates that between 80,000 and 100,000 Polish civilians were killed during the anti-Polish campaign carried out by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the military wing associated with the radical nationalist movement led by Stepan Bandera.

While Motyka rejects simplistic nationalist narratives, he has argued that the anti-Polish campaign meets the criteria of genocide because it involved a deliberate effort to remove an ethnic population from territories claimed for a future Ukrainian state.

Many Ukrainian historians reject the term, preferring to describe the violence as a tragic bilateral conflict. Their larger argument is that Volhynia violence did not conclude in 1944. It continued through reprisals, population transfers and ultimately ‘Operation Vistula’ in 1947, when Poland’s communist government forcibly dispersed around 140,000 Ukrainians and Lemkos across the country's newly acquired western territories.

After 1945, Soviet rule froze rather than resolved the conflict. The Soviet Union absorbed western Ukraine and Communist Poland became Moscow’s satellite. Public discussion of Volhynia largely disappeared. Soviet authorities suppressed Ukrainian nationalism while simultaneously preventing open debate about Polish-Ukrainian violence. The dead were buried beneath official silence.

Ironically, this silence allowed rival myths to harden.

The Return of History

In Poland, memories of Volhynia survived in family stories and émigré communities. In Ukraine, especially after independence in 1991, the UPA increasingly came to symbolise resistance against Moscow. Because Soviet propaganda had relentlessly denounced the UPA, many Ukrainians instinctively viewed its fighters as patriots. The fact that the UPA had also committed atrocities against Poles faded into the background.

This divergence widened after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its full-scale invasion in 2022. Ukraine urgently needed national heroes. Figures associated with anti-Soviet resistance acquired renewed importance. This led to the commemoration of UPA veterans. From Kyiv’s perspective, this was part of constructing an independent historical narrative free from Russian influence.

The paradox here is that no country has done more for Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in 2022 than Poland. Millions of Ukrainian refugees crossed into Poland while Polish public opinion mobilised on a scale unseen elsewhere in Europe. But beneath this solidarity lay unresolved memories.

Historians speak of ‘competitive victimhood,’ or the tendency of nations to define themselves through their own suffering while minimising that of others. The Polish-Ukrainian relationship personifies this phenomenon.

Poland endured Nazi occupation, genocide and Soviet domination. Ukraine suffered Stalinist terror, the Holodomor and Russian imperialism. Both emerged convinced that history had treated them exceptionally harshly.

The current dispute exposes the enduring power of borderlands. Volhynia was once a melting pot of Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, Russians, Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Greek Catholics. Such regions, however, rarely produce tidy histories.

Many assumed that shared opposition to Russia would eventually put the historical grievances between Poland and Ukraine to rest. But last week’s events suggest otherwise. The challenge for Poland and Ukraine today is not to forget the past but to prevent the past from becoming their future. The dead of Volhynia cannot be reconciled. The living, perhaps, still can.