The latest scandal in Polish-Ukrainian relations isn’t over grain, the Volhynia Genocide dispute, or the question of dispatching peacekeepers there, but over Poland’s earlier funding of a Ukrainian blogger. Vakhtiang Kipiani, a Ukrainian of Georgian heritage, threatened on Facebook that populist-nationalist Polish presidential candidate Slawomir Mentzen will meet the fate of an interwar Polish minister who was infamously assassinated by the “Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists” (OUN) on Bandera’s orders.
Mentzen had earlier recorded a video during his recent trip to Lvov where he stood in front of a Bandera statue and condemned him as a terrorist. He then responded to Kipiani’s threat by pointing out how he was awarded the Order of Stepan Bandera and even the Medal of Gratitude from the European Solidarity Centre in Gdansk. Mentzen also called on Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski to react to this egregious provocation against a presidential candidate as well as to Ukraine’s glorification of Bandera.
The Polish information portal Kresy,pl then reminded everyone that they discovered as far back as 2014 that Kipiani had received funding from the Polish Foreign Ministry from 2011-2013 for his work on historical subjects, including the Volhynia Genocide that Kipiani has perversely sought to justify. The larger scandal that’s emerging is therefore that Poland funded and might still be funding Ukrainian bloggers whose interpretation of historical events is at direct odds with their own government’s.
Their soft power efforts over the years are thus backfiring in the worst way possible after one of the recipients of the state’s largesse just threatened to kill a presidential candidate and consequently drew attention to Poland’s counterproductive USAID-like network in Ukraine. Instead of advancing national interests, some of these projects indisputably harm them like in Kipiani’s case, and it’s anyone’s guess how many more such examples there are since few have investigated this years-long campaign.
The timing couldn’t be worse since Ukrainian issues are playing an increasing role in the lead-up to May’s presidential election. The ruling liberal-globalist coalition is now pressured to take an even harder stance against Ukraine than they’ve recently begun to if they want their candidate Rafal Trzaskowski to beat the (very imperfect) conservative opposition’s Karol Nawrocki. If they don’t, then Mentzen might support Nawrocki in the second round if it comes to that in order to keep Trzaskowski out of power.
As was explained here, which referenced Mentzen’s trip to Lvov and the first scandal that followed its mayor lambasting him for his video, the liberal-globalists might flip-flop on sending peacekeepers to Ukraine if Trzaskowski wins the presidency while Nawrocki might hold firm on staying out of the fray. In other words, the outcome of the presidential election could ultimately determine Poland’s participation or lack thereof in any such mission, which might make it a game-changer in this conflict.
The liberal-globalists are now forced into the dilemma of condemning Kipiani and capitulating to pressure to suspend Poland’s USAID-like network in Ukraine pending the conclusion of an investigation into all the recipients or carrying on with business as usual. The first can keep them in some of the public’s good graces but at the expense of worsening already difficult ties with Ukraine while the second can sour more of the public on them ahead of May’s election in order to keep ties with Ukraine stable.
The sensitivity of what just happened, both from the Polish perspective of a previously government-funded Ukrainian blogger threatening to kill a presidential candidate and from the Ukrainian perspective of that same candidate condemning Bandera while in Lvov, can lead to unpredictable developments. It’s such an emotive issue that high-level politicians and average people alike on both sides might inject themselves into this scandal. That could accelerate the growing distrust of one another’s countries.
A self-sustaining cycle might soon follow whereby Poland and Ukraine drift further away from each other than they already have been in recent years over grain, the Volhynia Genocide dispute, and the question of dispatching peacekeepers. That could have enormous implications for May’s presidential election and thenceforth the European order after the end of the Ukrainian Conflict depending on the result so it should be assumed that the EU, Russia, and the US will all be monitoring latest scandal this very closely.
