(Bloomberg) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was left seething after a meeting last month with Poland’s top diplomat, who made a show of putting the brakes on Ukraine’s ambitions for fast-track accession to the European Union.
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During their exchange in Kyiv, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski also brought up Warsaw’s demands that the victims of World War II-era massacres of ethnic Poles be exhumed from land now belonging to Ukraine — and tied it to EU membership talks, according to participants.
The rift coincides with mounting war fatigue among Kyiv’s Western allies, with Russian troops making grinding advances in the country’s east. Zelenskiy’s push for Ukraine, a country bigger in size than France and an agricultural powerhouse, to gain rapid accession to the EU suggests a gap is widening with his most crucial supporters.
It comes as Kyiv also struggles to win support for its NATO bid — and faces shortages of weapons and money ahead of the Nov. 5 US presidential elections, in which the contenders offer drastically different views about the war’s endgame.
The renewed tensions with Ukraine’s EU neighbor, which have punctuated relations even during the Russian invasion, underscore Kyiv’s difficult path toward Western integration in a time of war.
“Ukraine is in a very complicated situation and not just because of the war,” said Judy Dempsey, non-resident fellow at Carnegie Europe in Berlin. “It’s kind of unfinished business about the past.”
Things looked more hopeful a year ago. When Donald Tusk returned to Poland’s premiership, he pledged to improve relations that had suffered under the previous nationalist government. That administration imposed a ban on Ukrainian grain imports in response to farmers who decried what they called a drop in prices prompted by a glut of wheat from the east.
Officials in Kyiv also placed hopes in Tusk, a former European Council president, to be an ally in shepherding Kyiv’s EU accession path, a labyrinthine procedure that can take decades.
But Tusk also had to navigate Polish politics. While he swore to rally support for Kyiv in his first speech to parliament last December, the premier made certain that he would display “cordial and friendly assertiveness” on issues that might place Poland’s national interests in jeopardy.
Memories of Volhynia
If EU accession can be negotiated in a political forum, the issue of the 1943 massacres of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists in the Volhynia region is becoming far more than a debate among historians. An estimated 100,000 people, including woman and children, perished in the slaughter.
Deputy Prime Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz, who leads one of the junior parties in the ruling coalition, has said Ukraine’s EU accession was out of question until the dead are treated with respect. Tusk said as much as well.
“There is a need to dig into this history if we are about to build a good future,” he told a news conference in Warsaw at the end of August. “As long as there is no respect for those standards from the Ukrainian side, then Ukraine will certainly not become part of the European family.”
To be sure, Poland continues to call for ever greater military support for Ukraine, tougher sanctions against Russia and has taken in almost 2 million refugees since the war began. But both countries have painful historical chapters to work through.
The division of Ukrainian lands between Poland and the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the World War I stoked ethnic grievances as Warsaw launched oppressive policies to assimilate new populations. Mounting hostilities culminated in the massacres of Poles in Volyhnia from 1943 to 1945 and the subsequent forced resettlement of some 150,000 Ukrainians.
While Kyiv recognizes the Volhynia atrocities, it has also called on Poland not to politicize the issue — and to seek ways for a peaceful settlement. But Sikorski’s focus on the issue in the meeting with Zelenskiy, which was also attended by Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis, showed that any intention to leave it to historians was a non-starter in Warsaw.
Sikorski often veers from diplomatic niceties. Quizzed about the meeting, the minister said in a radio interview that he knows “how to state matters firmly” — and was given assurances that a solution will be found. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha met his Polish counterpart and President Andrzej Duda in Warsaw this month and said the talks were “constructive” and “pragmatic.”
‘Skills of a Psychotherapist’
And while Ukrainians have expressed confidence that they’ve addressed the issue — Zelenskiy attended a church service in the region with Duda in 2023 — the Poles say they will stand by their demands. Leaving the issue unresolved creates an opening for extremists and undermines support for Kyiv, a Polish government official said.
Aleksander Kwasniewski, who served as Poland’s president from 1995 to 2005, said he worked with Ukraine to resolve the dispute when he was head of state, including a reconciliation agreement, working groups of academics and commemorations.
The former president, whose father was a survivor of the massacres, said he warned Sikorski that missteps in resolving the issue would only inflame extremists — and encouraged him to take a more balanced approach.
“It’s necessary to be a strong representative of Polish, European and Western interest — but also a very sensitive advocate of Ukrainian expectations,” Kwasniewski said in an interview. The effort requires “skills of a psychotherapist who understands the sensitivity of the whole situation,” he said.
–With assistance from Volodymyr Verbianyi and Daryna Krasnolutska.
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