“Yesterday marked the end of the long weekend, so hopefully when Tusk returns to political reality tomorrow, he will stop endorsing Minister Szeptycki’s Ukrainian agenda within the Polish government,” former Deputy Prime Minister Jacek Sasin wrote on X. He stressed that “dismissal is the bare minimum.”
The controversy concerns Szeptycki’s comparison of members of the UPA to Poland’s “Cursed Soldiers.”
“The UPA fought for Ukraine’s independence within the framework of the Ukrainian national imagination, primarily against the Soviets, and it was a hopeless struggle. With all the positive and negative connotations of the term, they were in some ways Ukrainian ‘Cursed Soldiers.’ (…) They were people who fought for a long time, consistently, under hopeless circumstances, and they represent a point of reference that Ukrainians fighting Moscow since 2014 can naturally draw upon,”
Szeptycki said on TOK FM.
His remarks triggered a wave of reactions and criticism. The opposition is now calling for the politician’s dismissal.
Among those speaking out was Jacek Sasin.
“Dismissal is the bare minimum. The security services should also determine whether Mr. Szeptycki’s activities within the government were merely the result of poor judgment and misguided decisions, or whether there was something more behind them,”
he wrote on X.