Poland held its annual commemoration of the Volhynia massacres on Saturday, marking the 83rd anniversary of the wartime killings of Polish civilians by Ukrainian nationalist forces at a moment of unusually high diplomatic tension with Kyiv, sparked by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to name a military unit after the nationalist group blamed for the killings.
Polish President Karol Nawrocki travelled to the small village of Radruż in southeastern Poland, less than a kilometre from the Ukrainian border, to mark the occasion. Radruż was among the many villages where the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, known by its Ukrainian acronym UPA, and the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, or OUN, killed Polish civilians during the massacres. “We refuse to allow the 120,000 Poles, civilians, women and children, brutally murdered by Ukrainian nationalists to be forgotten,” Nawrocki declared at the ceremony, according to Notes from Poland.
Poland observes the commemoration each year on July 11, the date in 1943 that became known as “Bloody Sunday,” when OUN and UPA forces carried out coordinated attacks on Polish civilians gathered for Sunday mass across dozens of villages in the Volhynia region, then part of German-occupied Poland. Historians estimate the broader campaign of killings, which continued into 1945 across Volhynia, Eastern Galicia and neighbouring regions, claimed up to 100,000 Polish lives, with the overwhelming majority of victims women and children.
11 lipca 1943 roku, w piękną, słoneczną niedzielę, Polacy szli do kościołów, by prosić Boga o miłość, miłosierdzie i dobrą przyszłość dla swoich rodzin. Zamiast modlitwy spotkała ich brutalna śmierć z rąk ukraińskich sąsiadów. Narzędzia gospodarstw domowych stały się narzędziami… pic.twitter.com/EitXMcM1EQ
— Karol Nawrocki (@NawrockiKn) July 11, 2026
A Careful Distinction Between Ideology and Nation
In his remarks, Nawrocki sought to draw a sharp line between condemning the historical perpetrators and casting judgment on modern-day Ukraine as a whole, a distinction he has repeated amid the current friction with Kyiv. “Today, we are not condemning the entire Ukrainian nation; we are condemning the Bandera ideology,” Nawrocki said, referencing Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian nationalist leader whose followers led the OUN and UPA and whose legacy remains deeply contested between the two countries. He added a call for historical clarity going forward, saying, “Today, we need truth and memory for a better future in the 21st century, without genocidal perpetrators and without genocidal symbols.”
Nawrocki also used the ceremony to honour the so-called “righteous Ukrainians” who tried to protect Polish neighbours during the massacres, noting that many of those individuals were themselves killed by nationalist forces as a consequence of their efforts to shelter Poles.
Tusk Announces a Warsaw Memorial, Even Amid Political Divide
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, whose government has periodically clashed with Nawrocki on other issues, struck a broadly similar tone in a separately recorded video message released to mark the anniversary. Tusk announced plans for a Wall of Remembrance to be built in Warsaw that will list the names of massacre victims, a project intended to give the killings a permanent, physical place of memory in the Polish capital.
The alignment between the two leaders on the substance of the commemoration, despite their frequent political disagreements, underscored the broad, cross-partisan resonance the Volhynia massacres continue to hold within Polish public life eight decades after the killings occurred.
A Dispute Reignited by a Ukrainian Military Honour
This year’s commemoration carries particular diplomatic weight following Zelensky’s decision to award an honorary title referencing the UPA to a Ukrainian special operations unit earlier this year, a move that Warsaw interpreted as an affront to the memory of Volhynia’s victims. In response, Nawrocki stripped Zelensky of Poland’s highest state honour, the Order of the White Eagle, escalating a dispute that has added fresh strain to what has otherwise been one of Ukraine’s most important wartime alliances.
Poland’s main opposition party, the national-conservative Law and Justice party, moved to capitalise on the tension, announcing it would submit a parliamentary resolution declaring that Poland will oppose Ukraine’s eventual accession to the European Union so long as the UPA continues to be honoured within Ukraine’s own institutions. The dispute has also generated confusion in Polish and Ukrainian media, with widely circulated reports incorrectly attributing to Poland’s deputy prime minister, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, a remark suggesting Ukraine would never join the EU “with Bandera,” a quote Notes from Poland reported he did not actually say.
A History of Fragile Reconciliation
The current friction represents a setback in what had been a gradually improving, if still delicate, effort at historical reconciliation between the two neighbours. In July 2023, then-Polish President Andrzej Duda and Zelensky jointly paid tribute to victims of the massacres in Lutsk, the administrative capital of the Volhynia region, in a ceremony accompanied by a joint declaration on reconciliation signed by senior Roman Catholic and Ukrainian Greek Catholic church leaders. In January 2025, Zelensky and Tusk reached a separate agreement permitting long-delayed exhumations of victims’ remains in Ukraine, a process Polish officials have said is essential both to properly honour the dead and to fully account for the scale of the killings.
Poland’s parliament, the Sejm, formally recognised the massacres as an act of genocide in a 2016 resolution and established July 11 as an annual day of remembrance under legislation adopted in 2025, with the first official observance held that year. The renewed dispute over Ukraine’s military honours now threatens to complicate the continuation of that reconciliation process, even as both countries remain bound together by Poland’s role as one of Kyiv’s most significant wartime backers against Russia’s ongoing invasion.
