By Marek Strzelecki and Barbara Erling
WARSAW, July 3 (Reuters) – Ukraine is looking for ways to lower tension with Warsaw, Poland’s prime minister said on Friday, adding that Poland’s neighbour to the east should come to terms with its history to join the European Union.
Diplomatic relations between the two countries entered their worst crisis since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine after Polish President Karol Nawrocki stripped Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Poland’s top honour.
Nawrocki said he took the step due to the naming of an army unit after insurgents who massacred Poles in World War Two.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a political opponent of Nawrocki, has been trying to smooth tensions, and said he had received positive signals from Friday’s meeting between Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha and his Polish counterpart Radoslaw Sikorski in Warsaw.
“I don’t know the results of the meeting, but I have signals that the Ukrainian side is looking for ways to ease the tension,” Tusk told a news conference.
COMING TO TERMS WITH HISTORY
In a separate press conference, Sikorski refused to be drawn on the details of the meeting, saying only that “diplomacy prefers silence”.
Sybiha said in a post on X that he proposed “a package of anti-crisis steps” including organising a meeting of World War Two historians and asking religious leaders to participate in dialogue.
However, he did not indicate that Kyiv would change the name of the military unit in question. “We respect the history of others, and we expect the same approach toward our own history and independence from our partners,” he said.
Some Ukrainians regard the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) as heroic for the resistance it mounted against the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and as a symbol of Kyiv’s struggle for independence from Moscow.
But the UPA was also involved in the Volhynia massacres, a series of killings from 1943 to 1945 in which Poland says around 100,000 Poles were killed by Ukrainian nationalists. Thousands of Ukrainians also died in reprisal killings.
TUSK ‘CAUTIOUS’ ON FINANCIAL AID
Tusk said Kyiv must come to terms with history to meet its ambition of joining the European Union, a process that diplomats expect will be complex and lengthy.
“There is no such thing as a European community without reconciliation, and there is no reconciliation without… coming to terms with a painful history.”
Tusk also said that he would ask the Polish delegation at the upcoming NATO summit to be “cautious” about promising more financial aid for Ukraine.
“Not because I do not believe that Ukraine needs financial support, but I believe that Poland has very significant obligations regarding the protection of the eastern border of the European Union.”
(Reporting by Marek Strzelecki, Barbara Erling, Pawel Florkiewicz in Warsaw, Yuliia Dysa in Kyiv, writing by Alan Charlish; Editing by Aidan Lewis)
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