Poland Joins Ranks Against Ukraine’s EU Accession

Poland’s deputy prime minister said on Tuesday, August 26th, that his government will block Ukraine from joining the European Union unless Kyiv recognises its role in a 1943 genocide.

Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, who is also Warsaw’s defence minister, insisted that Ukraine will have “no chance” of accession until there are exhumations or perhaps even a commemoration in connection with the massacre of around 100,000 Poles in Volhynia by Ukrainian nationalists. 

The killings have been the cause of tensions between the two countries for decades, with Poland viewing them as “ethnic cleansing with signs of genocide.”

The minister said he has made this demand “many times.”

Hungary and Slovakia have long cited more fundamental issues with calls for Ukraine to join the EU, especially—as Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó put it in late 2023—relating to violations of “the most basic rules of the EU in the areas of national community and ethnic minority rights.”

These two nations also effectively blocked the European Union’s recent €20 billion immediate military aid package to Ukraine, to the relief of other more tight-lipped critics.

Even European figures more favourable to Ukraine’s accession have accepted that it could take years—if not decades—for a proper membership offer to come to fruition.

Kosiniak-Kamysz’s view is no doubt backed by Poland’s new head of state, Karol Nawrocki, who this week proposed banning the promotion of WWII-era Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera. The president expressed his hope that a new bill

should clearly address Bandera and equate the Bandera symbol in the criminal code with symbols corresponding to … Nazism, and Soviet communism.

Also on Tuesday, Kosiniak-Kamysz hailed the “dignified burial for Poles” killed at the hands of the Soviet Union in World War II, thanking those responsible for “remembering the heroes of our freedom.”