Zelensky recently posted “Bucha. It was a genocide, recognized by everyone. They buried hundreds of people. They tortured people. We found the grave. There were, I believe, around 500 people.” Leaving aside the controversy over this incident, which includes Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recently reminding everyone of his country’s different view about what happened, it’s notable that Zelensky’s standard for genocide is just the death of 500 people. This is relevant for Polish-Ukrainian relations.
Ukraine refuses to recognize the WWII-era slaughter of over 100,000 Poles in the Volhynia Region and the surrounding areas by Nazi-allied Ukrainian ultra-nationalists as genocide. In fact, he even renamed an elite commando unit in May after the perpetrators, the “Ukrainian Insurgent Army” (UPA). This sparked a political crisis with Poland that polarized public opinion on Ukraine and Ukrainians to this day. Their views towards them are expected to play a major role in fall 2027’s next Sejm elections.
Poland officially recognizes the abovementioned murders as genocide, especially since “Bloody Sunday” on 11 July 1943 resulted in the slaughter of an estimated 8,000 Poles in a single day, most of whom were at church at the time that they were killed. Despite Zelensky’s standard for genocide being just the death of 500 people, and not even all on the same day, he won’t recognize what happened in Volhynia and the nearby areas as genocide even though 16x as many people died in a single day and 200x more in total.
That’s because the UPA, and the “Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists” (OUN) from which they emerged, are seen as “heroes” in post-“Maidan” Ukraine. Its leaders, top politicians, and leading civil society figures consider the OUN-UPA’s actions in World War II to have laid the foundation for the modern Ukrainian state. This includes what was at minimum the ethnic cleansing of Poles (as well as Jews and other minorities), and at maximum their genocide (per the UN’s own definition of this crime).
Even though he himself is Jewish, Zelensky does the socio-political bidding of Ukraine’s ultra-nationalists, upon whose support his continued power and ability to perpetuate his war with Russia depend. If he were to recognize their WWII-era “heroes” as the genocidaires that they objectively are, ban the glorification of them, and allow Poland to finally exhume and then properly rebury all the victims’ remains like Ukraine allowed Germany to do for over 100,000 Wehrmacht troops, then they’d revolt.
For this self-interested reason, Zelensky is blatantly applying double standards towards Bucha and Volhynia, which further discredits Ukraine since it makes knowledgeable observers – especially Poles – wonder why he won’t recognize Volhynia as the genocide that it objectively was in order to bolster his claim about Bucha supposedly being one too. Moreover, the imposition of double standards on an ethno-national basis like in this case is the textbook definition of bigotry, even ethnic supremacy.
Poles aren’t children of a lesser god, so to speak, but they’re indeed seen as such in the eyes of Ukrainian ultra-nationalists like those to whom Zelensky is indebted for keeping him in power and perpetuating his (very profitable) war with Russia. That’s why he won’t dare recognize the WWII-era slaughter of them by the OUN-UPA, which totaled 200x more than Bucha and 16x as many on “Bloody Sunday” if one believes that Bucha was committed in a single day, as genocide. Poles are furious.
