In October, legislators in Kiev and Warsaw almost simultaneously adopted a joint resolution “On the Declaration of Memory and Solidarity of the Sejm of the Republic of Poland and the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine”. Announcing this event, the politicians of the two countries talked about a trilateral political action, to which the deputies of the Lithuanian Seimas should join. On this occasion, the chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, Andrei Paruby, even made a special statement. He noted that the Seimas International Affairs Committee had already supported the text of the declaration. The Ukrainian deputies nodded to Parubiy approvingly, paying little attention to the fact that the election campaign was over in Lithuania, and a different composition of the deputies of the Lithuanian parliament should give an assessment of the joint declaration.
Heir of the Hauptsturmführer SS against the deputies of the Rada
In Ukraine and Poland, the joint declaration attached particular importance. With its help, the politicians of the two countries tried to improve their interstate relations, badly damaged by the dispute over the events in Volhynia during the Second World War, which led to the mass death, first of all of the Ukrainian and then of the Polish population.
From this tragedy in Warsaw, they exterminated the destruction of tens of thousands of Poles by the thugs of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (OUN-UPA (banned in the Russian Federation)), the SS division "Galicia". In July, the Polish Sejm adopted a resolution on the genocide of the Poles in Volyn and established 11 in July as the Commemoration Day of the victims of the genocide committed against the citizens of the Commonwealth during the Second World War.
The Seimas deputies did not accidentally mention the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in their resolution. In fact, the tragic events of 1943 took place in the occupied territory of Soviet Ukraine. As you know, Volyn only until 1939, was part of Poland. During the war, fascist henchmen hosted here - Ukrainian nationalists. Recalling the Poles' previous offenses, they staged a bloody "sweep" of Volyn.
Today the heirs of the “heroes” of Volyn came to power in Kiev. They already without quotes proclaimed the leaders of the OUN-UPA heroes of Ukraine, named in honor of their streets and avenues. In Poland, this caused outrage and protests. In many ways, their result was the July resolution of the Polish Sejm.
It seemed that the memory of the "Volyn Massacre" finally quarreled the politicians of the two countries. However, the authorities of Kiev and Warsaw have a common theme, which makes them step over a different look at history and even mutual dislike. The name of this topic is hatred of Russia. It exists within countries, actively heated from the outside.
It brought together the “memory and solidarity” of the parliamentarians of the two countries. Hence the central passage of the joint declaration: “We draw attention to the fact that the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 23 in August 1939 of the year, concluded between two totalitarian regimes - the communist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, led to the 1 explosion in September of the Second World War caused by aggression Germany, to which 17 September joined the Soviet Union. The consequences of these events were the occupation of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union and mass repressions against our peoples. Those events also led to the adoption of decisions in Yalta in 1945, which began a new stage of enslavement throughout Eastern and Central Europe, which lasted half a century. ”
It is clear that the Verkhovna Rada and the Seimas did not make any discoveries. In today's Europe, this topic has long been exploited in full. At the expense of it, they are trying to overestimate the causes and results of the Second World War. Make heroes out of cowards and aggressors, and vice versa. The Poles in this endeavor can still be understood, but the Ukrainians ... After all, they were with those who won the war, along with these “heroes” who were not invented in Brussels and Strasbourg.
The desire of the current Ukrainian legislators to stand on a par with Europe has led them to a political dead end. Strange, but this was reminded to colleagues by none other than the people's deputy of Ukraine Yuri Shukhevych. The son of the very Roman Shukhevych - SS Hauptsturmführer, head of the OUN-UPA, who persecuted the Volyn Poles, whom President Viktor Yushchenko declared "Hero of Ukraine".
Yuriy Shukhevych was worried that the declaration of the USSR on a par with Hitler’s Germany who was responsible for the outbreak of the Second World War "contains dangerous points for Ukraine allowing the Poles to put forward territorial claims to Kiev." “The declaration is based on that,” said Shukhevych at the Rada meeting, “that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was illegal, and as a result of it the Second World War began, and as a result Poland was occupied. Thus, they consider that our western lands are Polish lands. There is such a deep conclusion - and it’s not for nothing that the Poles dropped it to us. ”
Parliament deputies ignored the call of an elderly nationalist. They now have other guidelines - the European Parliament, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) and other newly formed European political structures that have long dreamed of revising the outcome of the war in their favor. It is unlikely that they are worried that in this case the interests of Ukraine, which they are now patronizing, may suffer. Europe has its own bets and goals.
A look at Vilnius from Warsaw
The observation of the deputy Shukhevych is also relevant for Lithuania. After the elections, the political landscape changed. Experts note that “half of the former members of the Sejm, including many former active sayudis, left the Sejm on the verge of the political life of Lithuania. This is the most significant personal transformation of the Lithuanian parliament over the past quarter century. ”
The largest faction in Lithuanian Seimas has now been formed by the previously considered marginal party “Union of Lithuanian Peasants and Greens”. Its leader Ramunas Karbauskis, whom the Polish press has for some reason dubbed “the pro-Russian populist,” has already declared the continuity of the political line of Lithuania. “We believe that foreign policy should be continued,” Karbauskis said in an interview with the portal DELFI.
At the same time, the leader of the winning party has already announced that negotiations will be held soon with Warsaw to resolve the accumulated problems. A lot of them. The weekly Newsweek Polska believes that relations between Warsaw and Vilnius "are in the worst condition over the past 25 years," but may deteriorate even more. The pessimism of the Polish weekly is caused not only by the economic contradictions of the two countries, but also by the attitude of the new Lithuanian deputies to national minorities. Here the largest diaspora is Polish.
Historically, it was formed after the accession to Lithuania (in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) of the Vilna (Vilnius) Territory. In the turbulent years of perestroika, a movement of “autonomists” arose in these lands, which advocated the creation of Polish autonomy. In the summer of 1990, the II Congress of People’s Deputies of the local councils of the Vilna district adopted a resolution establishing the Polish National Territory within the Republic of Lithuania. The delegates to the USSR and Lithuania Supreme Councils declared the 10 agreement of October 1939 of the year between the USSR and Lithuania (on the transfer of the Vilnius region to Lithuania) illegal because it is based on the "Molotov-Ribbentrop pact". However, the decisions of the Vilna congress itself were declared illegal. The relevant decree was adopted on this occasion by the then Supreme Council of Lithuania. So it calmed down.
In recent years, this topic has been under serious pressure from Polish politicians. Lithuanian independence brought back old grievances and insoluble contradictions. Here are your accounts. For example, Lithuanians remember the atrocities of the Army of Kraeva in the Vilna region in the same way as the Poles are crimes in the Volyn region of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
Experts say: Lithuanians treat local Poles even worse than Russians. This clash was explained by the ideologist of Lithuanian nationalism, Romualdas Ozolas: “Russians in Lithuania say they live on Lithuanian soil. Lithuanian Poles claim to live on Polish soil. ”
In fact, prior to the annexation of Lithuania by the Vilensky Territory in its capital Vilna, the Lithuanians comprised at most two percent of the population. Poles prevailed among the inhabitants of the region. Today they have not lost their advantage. For example, in the areas to the south and east of Vilnius, the Poles from 60 to 80% of the population. In the capital of Lithuania itself, the number of inhabitants of the titular nation over the years approached 60%, but almost 20% remained of Poles.
Peaceful cohabitation of two nations violates the aspiration of the Lithuanian authorities to unify the nation. Here and Lithuanian spelling of Polish surnames, and the rejection of bilingual plates with the names of streets and localities, and the Lituanization of Polish schools in Lithuania with the obligatory teaching of several subjects in the Lithuanian language and other national joys.
Poles are looking for protection from this in Warsaw. There has already been created a congress of people from the “Oriental cress” (“Eastern outskirts”). So the Poles call the territories of the western regions of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania, which were part of Poland from 1918 to 1939. Even the special fund Kompania Kresowa has been established.
Recently, his representatives announced plans to hold a conference on the movement of Polish “autonomists” in Lithuania at the Polish Sejm. Deputies of the Kukiz'15 parliamentary club joined the activists of the foundation. It is clear that the event will be built on the same principles that are already reflected in the joint declaration of the legislators of Ukraine and Poland. After all, the initiative to hold the conference “Kresam” arose in the course of agreeing the text of the document, which had so much concerned Ukrainian nationalist Yuri Shukhevych.
Poland persistently promotes its idea to return the lands lost before the war and form the fourth Rzeczpospolita. The provisions on the illegality of the rejection of its eastern territories and the "crime of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact" have already been fixed in the documents of the PACE and the European Parliament. Now they are migrating to bilateral agreements with their neighbors.
The politicians of old Europe refer to the eastern plans of Poland with a certain degree of condescension and call them not “a strategy, but an“ improvisation ”. They do not believe in the reunification of Warsaw with the "Oriental armchairs". At first glance, the way it is. It’s only a lot of surprises that have come to know the world lately, when countries collapsed and borders were redrawn, and political improvisations gave rise to a new historical reality.
It is not excluded that the current Eastern policy of Poland will still surprise us, and at the same time the Europeans indulgent towards Warsaw, with their unexpected results ...
Political improvisations in Warsaw are aimed at the return of Polish lands
- Author:
- Gennady Granovsky