Current leader of the “Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists” (OUN) Bogdan Chervak, whose predecessors were responsible for the Volhynia Genocide, ominously warned that “Poles are playing with fire” after being triggered by a shitpost map that was shared by an anonymous account. He then nastily added, “And after that they are indignant that Ukraine reluctantly gives permits for the exhumation of Polish graves”, which is a reference to the aforementioned World War II-era crime.
The map that prompted this scandalous reaction from the OUN chief depicted Russia’s Kaliningrad Region as part of today’s Poland as well as the interwar Second Polish Republic’s “Eastern Borderlands” (“Kresy”) that are currently located in parts of Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. It was the inclusion of the last-mentioned country’s territory which triggered Chervak into lashing out against Poles in general and issuing his ominous warning to all of them that then went viral on the Polish segment of X.
That was an overreaction since Poland doesn’t have claims to any of those territories and even the most fringe ultra-nationalist political parties don’t want them back. While it’s true that some patriotic Poles experience “phantom pain” since those lost lands were integral to their civilization-state during the height of its power, the costs of reclaiming them are unacceptable. Nobody wants to wage war against NATO ally Lithuania, nuclear-armed Russia (which protects Belarus), and/or battle-hardened Ukraine.
The anonymous account who shared that shitpost map of Poland didn’t explain what they meant to convey by it but they did react to Chervak’s remark about the Volhynia Genocide that was copied by another popular Ukrainian account. They wrote, “That’s just an excuse. They don’t give permission because they’d rather worship Nazis”, which aligns with what Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski said in early October about that crime.
In his own words, “We only demand from Ukraine what Ukraine allowed the Germans to do to the aggressors: 100,000 Wehrmacht soldiers were exhumed and buried in separate graves on Ukrainian territory. Therefore, we believe that our compatriots, who were not aggressors there, have at least the same rights as Wehrmacht soldiers.” Readers can learn more about why “Ukraine’s Refusal To Exhume & Properly Bury The Volhynia Genocide’s Victims Enrages Poles” from the preceding hyperlinked analysis.
That issue returned to the fore of Polish-Ukrainian relations after former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry “Kuleba Equated Ukraine’s Genocide Of Poles With Poland’s Forcible Resettlement Of Ukrainians” in late August. While doing so, he provocatively described the southeastern areas of the post-war “Polish People’s Republic” from which his co-ethnics were forcibly resettled as “Ukrainian territories”, which prompted a strong rebuke from leaders of the ruling Polish coalition due to the claims that it implied.
It was explained in June why “Poland Fears That Ukraine Might One Day Make Irredentist Claims Against It” so this response was expected considering that Kuleba was Kiev’s top diplomat when he said that. Nevertheless, this is a problem of Poland’s own making after accepting so many Ukrainian refugees from 2022 onward, during which time it was predicable that some OUN supporters would infiltrate the country to set up sleeper cells for carrying out irredentist-driven terrorist attacks at a future date.
Between Kuleba’s inflammatory words that lent credence to the OUN’s latent claims and its chief Chervak’s ominous warning that “Poles are playing with fire” was British social anthropologist Chris Hann’s commentary on this subject in mid-October. He wrote that “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.”
Hann then added that, “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.” He’s one of the founding Directors of Germany’s publicly financed Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, which is why what he wrote led to such a firestorm online. Polish analyst Zygfryd Czaban drew attention to that part of his article on X, after which it was picked up by several Polish outlets.
It was within this political context that that anonymous account shared the shitpost map which triggered OUN chief Chervak, thus suggesting that it could have just been a reaction to Kuleba and Hann after those two’s words questioning the legitimacy of Poland’s post-war borders went viral. The intent might therefore have been to remind Ukrainians that non-existent Polish claims to their country would have a more legitimate historical basis than their claims to Poland in order to get them to stop provoking Poles.
Chervak is infamous for bashing Poles and hatemongering against them so it’s no surprise that he purposely overreacted to that shitpost map to ominously warn that they’re “playing with fire”, knowing fully well how this would be perceived by those who remember the OUN’s genocidal past. Without realizing it, however, he also discredited claims that Russia is trying to sow discord in Polish-Ukrainian relations by doing precisely that on his own while representing a vehemently anti-Russian organization.
Nobody could credibly accuse Chervak of being a “Russian propagandist”, which proves that Polonophobia is part and parcel of Ukrainian nationalism, not a Kremlin invention. Wider awareness of this fact will exacerbate anti-Ukrainian sentiment in Poland, which is rapidly growing as proven by the latest survey from a publicly financed research institute that was analyzed here. Therein lies the most important takeaway from this scandal since it’ll further divide Poland and Ukraine at the societal level.
Some Poles had already begun souring on Ukrainian refugees even before this latest scandal while farmers protested the influx of cheap Ukrainian grain into their domestic market throughout 2023 and earlier this year with the support of the majority of their compatriots as proven by reliable polling here. Ukrainians negatively reacted on social media to these developments, which in turn fueled more negative reactions from Poles there too, thus leading to a self-sustaining cycle of mutual hostility.
The latest scandal over territorial claims could bring these simmering tensions to the breaking point. While the ones against Ukraine by Poland are purely the result of a shitpost map by an anonymous account, the ones against Poland by Ukraine are much more official. They were implied by its former Foreign Minister, supported by a German government-financed British social anthropologist, and ominously hinted at by the chief of the same organization that genocided Poles over prior related claims.
“Poland Finally Maxed Out Its Military Support For Ukraine” as admitted by its Defense Minister in late August so there’s nothing left for it to withhold as leverage to resolve the Volhynia Genocide dispute in its favor or get Ukraine to explicitly condemn the abovementioned territorial claims to Poland. It also won’t cut off NATO’s military logistics to Ukraine through its territory as leverage either since it knows that would deal a fatal blow to the West’s proxy war on Russia there and it doesn’t want Moscow to win.
Ukraine is still losing though in spite of Poland’s charitable approach so it’s only a question of how much Russia will win by the time that this conflict finally ends. Foreseeably worsened Polish-Ukrainian relations at the societal and potentially official levels by that time might therefore be opportunistically exploited by Kiev to conveniently pin the blame for its defeat (or at least part of it) on Warsaw and then push these latent territorial demands as compensation for the lands that it lost to Russia.
The explosion of ultra-nationalist sentiment within Ukrainian society since 2022 could easily be redirected away from Russia and against Poland once the conflict ends after the former proved itself too formidable of a foe to defeat while the latter might then appear to be easy pickings. Poland gave its entire stockpile to Ukraine, has been excluded from the conflict’s endgame by the West as explained here after late-October’s Berlin Summit, and naively let countless OUN sleeper cells into the country.
The stage is thus set after the latest scandal over territorial claims for Ukraine to either officially make such demands of Poland upon the end of the NATO-Russian proxy war or at least continue informally putting them forth for self-interested domestic political reasons. Poland would struggle to defend the legitimacy of its post-war borders in the court of Western public opinion should that happen, but a hot war with Ukraine is unlikely, though irredentist-driven terrorist attacks can’t be ruled out in that event.
