“Ukrainians do not have to glorify murderers; they have many heroes of their own. Heroes of this war, heroes from earlier periods, and heroes from those times as well. There were many Ukrainians who hid Poles, helped them survive in attics, took them to hospitals, or warned them in advance of impending mortal danger, for which they themselves paid with their lives,” Przemysław Czarnek said today in Lublin while announcing a draft parliamentary resolution. The Law and Justice parliamentary group will call on the government to block Ukraine’s integration process with the European Union.
July 11 marks the National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Genocide Committed by Ukrainian Nationalists Against Citizens of the Second Polish Republic. Przemysław Czarnek began the day by laying flowers at the Volhynia victims’ memorial in Lublin, where he also addressed the public.
“Today marks the 83rd anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the genocide committed by Ukrainian nationalists of the OUN-UPA against Poles in Volhynia, Eastern Lesser Poland, the Subcarpathian region, and the Lublin region. We begin by laying a wreath here in Lublin, where many families arrived from those areas. That is why this monument stands here. It bears the correct dates: 1939-1947. The events connected with the Nazi Banderite ideology of the OUN-UPA, described in numerous documents by the creators of that ideology, were nothing other than Ukrainian nationalism, which was intended to, and did, lead to ethnic cleansing on an unprecedented scale and to the extermination of all other nationalities living in those lands,”
Czarnek said.
“And it was carried out in the most brutal way imaginable. It was downright bestial, as Kołodziejski himself described it. Although he was wrong, because animals do not behave this way. Only people who are morally depraved and stripped of all values behave like this. This is our past, and we fight for it because the past is simply today, only a little further away. It is a past that must be uncovered for the sake of the future. It is a past that must be commemorated. These are victims murdered with such brutality that it is difficult even to speak about it. It is a past that compels us to demand, persistently and until it is done, the exhumation of all those murdered, at least tens of thousands who still lie in Ukraine’s fields. It is a past that obliges us to bury them with dignity and build graves at their burial sites,” he stressed.
As he said, “that is the past, but what is even more important is the present and the future.”
“Today, we have a moral duty to call on every European and global capital to stop the revival of Nazi ideology in Ukraine. There is no other way to describe it. If someone names a military unit after the heroes of the UPA, the very criminals who massacred Polish families in the most barbaric way, it is no different from naming a military unit in Germany after Adolf Hitler today. Everyone understands that German Nazism, which pursued the same objective, namely ethnic cleansing, was no different. Why is Ukraine allowed today to glorify killers and murderers who collaborated with the Third Reich?”
he asked.
“Why is Ukraine today allowed to glorify the ideology of Banderism, which is equivalent to German Nazism? Why is there no response to what Zelensky and his administration are doing?”
he continued.
He announced that the Law and Justice parliamentary group would soon submit to the Sejm a draft resolution of the Sejm of the Republic of Poland opposing Ukraine’s membership in the European Union due to its glorification of the perpetrators of the Volhynia massacre.
“Through this resolution, we demand that the government undertake every possible measure to oppose any further advancement of Ukraine’s integration process with the European Union. The European Union cannot be built on an ideology that contradicts Christian values. It cannot include among its members a country that openly invokes the legacy of the worst possible ideology,” the candidate for prime minister said.
“Ukrainians do not have to glorify murderers; they have many heroes of their own. Heroes of this war, heroes from earlier periods, and heroes from those times as well. There were many Ukrainians who hid Poles, helped them survive in attics, took them to hospitals, or warned them in advance of impending mortal danger, for which they themselves paid with their lives. There are documented cases of Ukrainians who were dismembered and tortured to death by fellow Ukrainians, their own countrymen, simply because they had betrayed the ideology of Banderism. Ukraine is not doomed to glorify Banderism,”
Czarnek concluded.