“We must make Ukraine understand that it will not be rebuilt without Poland, because Poland occupies a strategic position,” Law and Justice deputy leader Przemysław Czarnek said on TV Republika, discussing ways to change Ukraine’s attitude towards the glorification of perpetrators of genocide. He stressed that reconciliation with Poland’s neighbours was necessary, but would not take place unless they “faced the truth.”
Czarnek acknowledged that reconciliation with Ukraine was needed. “We are in a part of the world […] where we need good relations with our neighbours, both those to the west and those to the east, to defend ourselves against the aggressors that pose the greatest danger today. Our ancestors and our outstanding statesmen in the past sought to ensure that we had buffer zones separating us from Russia, which has always represented a mortal threat to us. There are Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania; all of these are countries that we genuinely need. However, what we need are countries with which we can maintain normal relations based on mutual respect, whereas today that is particularly difficult,” he said.
“This reconciliation is needed and necessary, but it is, of course, conditional. We can reconcile and maintain normal relations with our neighbours, even despite such a tragic past, but only on condition that this past is truthfully acknowledged and that genocide is not glorified,” he emphasised, later adding that Bandera’s ideology was, in effect, a Nazi ideology.
He added that Zelensky’s decision to name a military unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army was “exactly as though Germany had named a military unit after Göring, Hitler, or the Waffen-SS.”
Asked how Poland could bring about a change in Ukraine’s approach to the issue, he referred, among other things, to the resolution he had presented. “No to Ukraine’s membership of the European Union until it begins to uphold values, values rooted in Christianity, truth, and justice. If it continues to embrace these anti-values, the Polish state will simply prevent Ukraine from joining the European Union. Likewise, all assistance to Ukraine should be suspended for the time being, until Ukraine ceases glorifying genocide, allows us, here and now, to exhume the bodies of all our compatriots who were brutally murdered in the east, and begins to cooperate with us based on an equal partnership,”
he said.
“It seemed that after February 24, 2022, after Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine, after three million people from Ukraine arrived in Poland in just three weeks, after they were welcomed here, after they expressed their gratitude, and after the Ukrainian state received assistance from us Poles, in the form of equipment […] it would genuinely become possible to create a new chapter in history, that our relations would finally become more open and that there would be truth and reconciliation. Today, however, since Ukraine itself does not want this, as demonstrated by Zelensky’s absurd decisions, through which he is seeking to conceal corruption on a gigantic scale and the plundering of the Ukrainian people by his administration, and is pursuing this course only because elections are probably approaching there, we must say ‘stop’ to Ukraine in every area. We must simply compel it to act normally. We must also make Ukraine understand that it will not be rebuilt without Poland, because Poland occupies a strategic position, and reconstruction will not take place without Polish participation. Reconstruction will be possible when Ukraine faces the truth and bases its actions on the values that guide all of us in Europe,”
he said.