When you grind your foreign policy into a weapon against Moscow, you had better be sure that your own historical closet is free of skeletons. Volodymyr Zelensky is learning this lesson the hard way, as a row over a World War II Ukrainian nationalist unit threatens to fracture the fragile unity of the Western alliance. The Polish government, facing its own domestic pressures, has demanded that Kyiv formally apologise and resolve the legacy of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), an organisation that collaborated with the Nazis and committed ethnic cleansing against Poles in Volhynia in 1943.
For Zelensky, this is not a matter of history. It is a matter of survival. He needs Poland’s support to maintain the flow of Western arms and to secure a path towards NATO membership.
Yet he also presides over a nation where the UPA is still venerated by many as freedom fighters against Soviet oppression. To appease Warsaw is to alienate the nationalist wing of his own government. To ignore it is to risk a diplomatic rupture that his enemies in the Kremlin will eagerly exploit.
The tragedy is that this row was entirely predictable. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Poland and Ukraine have engaged in a delicate dance of reconciliation. But the 2014 revolution and the subsequent war with Russia radicalised Ukrainian identity.
The heroisation of the UPA, once a fringe position, became mainstream. Now, with the entire Western alliance watching, Zelensky must perform a high-wire act: satisfy Poland’s legitimate grievances without inciting a political crisis at home. This is the curse of playing the West’s great anti-Russian hope.
You inherit the support of nations with their own complicated histories. Poland, itself a victim of both Hitler and Stalin, sees the UPA as a stain that must be cleansed before full trust is given. The NATO alliance, already strained by Hungary’s and Turkey’s obstinacy, cannot afford another fracture.
Yet the demand for a clear mea culpa on the UPA ignores the reality that Ukrainians are fighting a war of national survival. You cannot ask a man to apologise for the sins of his grandfather while a Russian missile is flying toward his house. This is the intellectual decadence of the Western commentariat: they demand moral purity from the victims of aggression while the aggressor commits war crimes with impunity.
Zelensky’s response has been typically deft. He has called for more dialogue, proposing a joint commission of historians to examine the Volhynia events. But this is an evasion.
He knows that no commission can resolve a dispute that is fundamentally about national identity. The real question is whether Poland will allow its historical grievances to undermine the strategic imperative of supporting Ukraine. If Warsaw persists, it will hand Vladimir Putin a propaganda victory far greater than any territorial gain.
The lesson of history is clear: when allies quarrel over the past, the enemy wins the future.
