The history Poland and Ukraine never learned to talk about — opinion

15 September, 02:51 AM

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Józef Piłsudski (Photo: Bettmann / Getty Images)

That asymmetry in historical memory is one of the reasons why arguments between Poles and Ukrainians so often appear to start in the middle of the story.

Lukasz Wojtkowski, a Polish researcher specialising in disinformation and information warfare, believes that one of the roots of today's Polish-Ukrainian historical conflict is that many Poles simply know too little about what happened on Ukrainian territories between the two world wars.

“We take the 20 years between 1919 and 1939 as a part of the resurrection of Poland, the great Polish society, the great Polish state,” Wojtkowski says. “We tend to bleach it a bit, to show it as a bit brighter than it was.”

For Ukrainians, the interwar period is inseparable from questions of Polish rule, discrimination and the Pacification policy such as the suppression of Ukrainian political and cultural aspirations, closures or destructions of Ukrainian institutions, and mass arrests and murders of Ukrainian activists.

For many Poles, meanwhile, the story of Ukraine in the 20th century is instead dominated by the Volyn tragedy and the memory of Polish civilians killed by Ukrainian nationalist forces.

“The Volyn events are still an open wound for many Poles who share family history of that experience,” Wojtkowski says. “But at the same time, Poland has a homework to do when it comes to understanding what Polish rule meant for Ukrainians before the Second World War.”

That unfinished historical conversation has become a part of a much wider political argument over Ukrainians in Poland as well as a source for information warfare.

A history that travels well online

“Most of the posts on this subject in the Polish infosphere are posts inciting Poles to hatred toward Ukrainians.”

For Anna Mierszynska, a Polish researcher who studies disinformation, that is the dividing line from a difficult historical argument. The existence of disagreement over Volyn, she stresses, is not itself evidence of manipulation. A genuine debate involves listening to both sides, considering new evidence and trying to explain what happened. The problem begins when historical memory is repeatedly used to attach the actions of people who lived 80 years ago to Ukrainians living in Poland today.

The technique is simple but emotionally powerful. Posts describing the murder and suffering of Polish civilians during the Volyn massacres are placed alongside reports about crimes allegedly committed by Ukrainian citizens in contemporary Poland. Some of those reports are false; others may concern real incidents but are presented without the context needed to understand them.

“The juxtaposition of escalating descriptions of historical crimes with contemporary cases of lawbreaking creates strong fear, dislike and hatred toward Ukrainians,” Mierszynska says.

While the Polish-Ukrainian grievances were put aside in the beginning of the Russian full-scale invasion, they reappeared in the following months as more than a million Ukrainians moved to Poland for safety reasons. During this period, some of the most persistent claims focused on competition between Ukrainians and Poles in everyday life. Ukrainians were accused of taking Polish jobs, receiving preferential access to doctors or occupying places in kindergartens that should have gone to Polish children. Mierszynska says these stories frequently took real problems in Poland, such as long healthcare waiting lists, and assigned responsibility for them to Ukrainian refugees.

“They blamed Ukrainian refugees for problems that already existed in Poland,” she says.

The newer narratives are more explicitly threatening. Ukrainians are increasingly presented as a criminal or physical danger, while Volyn is used to construct a bridge between historical violence and imagined future violence. One recurring claim is that Ukrainians may turn against Poland after the war with Russia ends. Another suggests that Ukraine wants to seize Polish territory near the border.

These claims aim to create insecurity and work with existing traumas such as the memory of the Volyn events. In addition to spreading hatred in the Polish society, they can also be used within Ukraine to stir hatred toward Poles. If Ukrainians encounter Polish political rhetoric about Volyn without any acknowledgement of the interwar history of Ukrainian life under Polish rule or post-Volyn retaliations, they may conclude that Poland's historical memory leaves no room for Ukrainian suffering. That can deepen Ukrainian distrust and make hopes of further reconciliation harder. 

Russian amplifier

Russia benefits from this gap in neighbors’ histories although it did not create it.

“There is a high level of activity by pro-Russian environments, Russian accounts and influencers on social media around these issues,” Mierszynska says. Researchers have observed similar anti-Ukrainian messages appearing across Russian Telegram channels, Russian state media, pro-Russian activists in Poland and parts of the Polish far right.

“However, it is not important whether the content is distributed by Russian actors themselves or whether they only inspire particular groups in Poland,” Mierszynska says. “What matters is the result.”

A Russian account can introduce a narrative, but then, it is a Polish political actor who may be repeating it because it resonates with voters. Further, these narratives can be picked up by influencers as controversial content generates attention, and then average users may engage with it because it confirms something they already believe. None of those people need to have coordinated with one another for the narrative to spread.

Wojtkowski describes the process as a “playbook” in which Russia amplifies conflicts that already exist between the two societies. Volyn is especially useful because it can activate Polish anger about Ukrainian nationalism while simultaneously supporting the Kremlin's portrayal of contemporary Ukraine as a country supposedly dominated by nationalist or “fascist” forces.

“Volyn is a playbook for propaganda and disguised disinformation,” he says. “It is the only open case between those two nations that could spark the engine of disinformation and hatred.”

The symbolism of Stepan Bandera makes the subject even more combustible. In Poland, Bandera is strongly associated with Ukrainian nationalism and the crimes committed by Ukrainian nationalist forces. In Ukraine, parts of his legacy remain connected to the struggle for independence from foreign domination. Wojtkowski notes that Bandera himself was imprisoned in 1941 and was not directly involved in the Volyn massacres, but this detail does not change how politically loaded his figure has become.

Poland and Ukraine have made progress on exhumations and commemorations of victims. Yet Mierszynska says that some groups that repeatedly demanded exhumations appeared less interested in historical resolution than in maintaining an anti-Ukrainian argument.

“It turned out that for these groups it did not matter,” she says. “It was a false argument, not an element of a genuine debate.”

Wojtkowski makes a similar point from another direction. Even a breakthrough in which both countries acknowledged crimes committed against the other, completed exhumations and established a shared framework for commemoration would not necessarily end the political conflict.

“Imagine that in two weeks Poland and Ukraine commemorate every victim,” he says. “Ukraine admits that they killed so-and-so, Poland admits what we did, everybody is exhumed. Would it change a thing? I doubt it.”

When media becomes part of the mechanism

The boundary between propaganda and ordinary journalism is another part of the problem, says Daryna Sydorenko, Senior Advisor at the Alliance 24/08 NGO and Coordinator of “Observatory of Hate – See. Monitor. React.” Over the past two years, she says, negative reactions to stories involving Ukrainians have intensified across Facebook, TikTok, Telegram and even LinkedIn.

“The mention of Ukraine and Ukrainians is always accompanied by such heavy emotions,” Sydorenko says, describing anger and aggression that now appear even underneath relatively neutral stories. Her project tracked how messages about Ukrainians moved from Polish-language Telegram channels into the wider media environment, while also monitoring physical attacks against Ukrainians as an extreme manifestation of that hostility.

Telegram was particularly useful for following this process because it acts as an aggregator.

“On these Telegram channels you could really find a collection of all the information from TikTok,” Sydorenko says. The channels brought together videos, news, political statements and material from other platforms, making it possible to see which politicians and messages were being repeatedly highlighted.

The result was often a much more hostile interpretation of otherwise ordinary events. Sydorenko recalls one report about a Ukrainian soldier on leave in Odesa who went into a courtyard and fired a starter pistol before threatening to detonate a grenade. Nobody was injured and he was detained for hooliganism, but the story was presented in an especially sensational way.

“The editorial office was probably simply chasing sensationalism,” she says. “They wanted to tell more about these kinds of moments because they attract readers' attention.”

The problem, she adds, came when such stories were then combined with reports about drug trafficking or crime.

“When you put this together with the materials they selected about drug trafficking or crime in general, of course it creates a certain image.”

Sydorenko gives another example involving a cross-border operation against drug laboratories. Posts on Polish-language Telegram channels presented the case as evidence that Ukraine had become a hub for drug trafficking from Mexico and that Ukrainian gangs were flooding Poland. In reality, she says, the operation involved Ukrainian and Polish authorities working together to dismantle laboratories; 36 were located in Ukraine, two in Poland and two in Moldova, while Mexico had nothing to do with the operation described.

A similar process occurred around a real article about changes to free health insurance for Ukrainians. The original story discussed the potential consequences for Ukrainians who might lose coverage, particularly vulnerable groups such as pensioners. Most Ukrainians living in Poland as refugees are employed, Sydorenko says, but the change could disproportionately affect those who are no longer working. The article was subsequently reframed as evidence of Ukrainian “ingratitude” towards Polish hospitality and the idea that Poland should begin reducing that hospitality. 

Building resilience beyond fact-checking

To address these fakes and manipulations, researchers recommend going beyond debunking and instead, focus on prebunking. This means explaining a misleading narrative before it spreads widely. The public can be warned in advance about the techniques being used to push a particular idea, allowing people to recognise the manipulation when they encounter it rather than only learning about it afterwards.

“When it comes to false news and manipulative narratives, we need not only to analyse them, but also to develop and deploy counter-narratives,” says Wojtkowski, “We know what is happening, who is doing it, how often it happens, and we can even predict what will come next. But this is where we have failed, both Ukrainians and Poles because we are still not very good at countering these narratives.”

But information literacy alone will not solve the deeper problem. Mierszynska argues that emotional manipulation works precisely because it exploits existing fears and distrust, meaning that debunking individual posts cannot repair a relationship that has become politically toxic.

“We will not build resilience if we act only at the information level,” the expert says. “We need to build stronger relations between Poles and Ukrainians through integration, getting to know one another and building trust. Both sides need to work on this, including the Ukrainian diaspora in Poland. When we know and trust each other, external influences have much less power. That is what we need most today.”

For Poland, that means remembering Volyn without treating contemporary Ukrainians as collectively responsible for crimes committed generations ago. For Ukraine, it means recognising the depth of Polish historical trauma without dismissing every Polish concern as Russian propaganda. Both societies need enough historical confidence to acknowledge the suffering of the other without surrendering their own memory.

“Both nations need to do their history homework,” says Wojtkowski, “So besides capturing harmful narratives and developing counter-narratives, we must be bringing that response down to the level of everyday society.”

By Anna Romandash and Nata Yasevych.

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