I’ve just come back from a trip to Kyiv, where after more than four years of war, it can feel like the political and diplomatic news agenda has become cyclical: a suggestion that some kind of peace deal could be around the corner, followed by the swift intervention of reality that the Kremlin has no interest in abandoning its maximalist goals, and we all go back to the drawing board.
We are now in a period where Russia has again stepped up its air attacks on the Ukrainian capital. Frequent mass drone and missile attacks keep Kyiv residents awake, and some even get through to the city centre, whereas in the past Ukrainian air defences were usually able to repel them. Nights can be noisy and scary: one attack while I was there killed 27 people. Thousands head into the metro to get some sleep.
So what are the chances that Putin’s planned three-day war will finally come to an end in its fifth year? All of Donald Trump’s attempts to bring it to a close have failed, and these efforts have been somewhat muted over past months as Washington turned its attention to the Middle East. But the theme is again hanging in the air in Kyiv, and there is now cautious optimism in some quarters that late autumn this year might provide a possible window for some kind of a deal. Ukraine is keen to avoid another winter at war, and Vladimir Putin finds himself under pressure from Kyiv’s campaign of spectacular long-range drone strikes on Russia’s oil infrastructure. Others are more sceptical, pointing to Putin’s recent aggressive rhetoric and suggesting it’s much more likely that Moscow will double down than seek agreement.
Domestically, political life is hotting up, with Volodymyr Zelenskyy about to reshuffle the government yet again, and rumours that he could seek a renewed mandate in a presidential election, which might swiftly follow some kind of ceasefire. As usual, when these discussions surface there are more questions than answers: even if there was a ceasefire, how would voting be organised for frontline communities, for Ukrainians living under Russian occupation and for the millions of refugees abroad? Who would stand against Zelenskyy, and is a real political contest possible in the circumstances?
Tensions between allies
If these debates are familiar to those who have been following the war in Ukraine, there is one new scandal that has erupted in recent weeks: the increasingly acrimonious nature of a falling out between Ukraine and Poland. Back in 2022, Warsaw was one of Kyiv’s most reliable allies but a dispute over history has brought the relationship to crisis point.
It centres on Polish fury that Ukrainian authorities have decided to name a military unit after the “Heroes of the UPA” – the UPA being a wartime nationalist group, one branch of which was responsible for massacres of Poles and Jews durng the second world war. This has, unsurprisingly, been greeted with fury in Warsaw.
It’s a fiendishly complicated story – as historical memory issues usually are – but I’ve tried to unpack it in this piece I reported from both Kyiv and Warsaw. It’s something I’d wanted to write for a while, but it’s one of those that can be very hard to get across all the nuance in.
After all, the idea that Ukraine is full of fascism-loving neo-Nazis is a key trope of Kremlin propaganda. I wrote a whole book about historical memory in Ukraine and Russia back in 2018, and how selective or distorted narratives of the second world war informed modern-day events and bubbled under the surface during the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and then of Donbas.
In the four years since Russia’s full-scale invasion, we’ve written countless stories about how Ukrainians are pushing back against Russia’s fake history, reclaiming their cultural heritage and building a new and consolidated national identity. But the tension with Poland introduces a more complicated element into Ukraine’s memory wars. Many people – not only Poles – take issue with veneration of the UPA.
What has struck me from conversations in both Ukraine and Poland in recent weeks is the depth of animosity among ordinary people on both sides. Ukrainians rage that Poland is playing into Russian hands by fussing over history in a time of war; Poles say that after four years of supporting Ukraine with military and humanitarian aid, the least they could expect would be for their ally not to honour historical figures who massacred Poles.
Bartosz Cichocki, Poland’s former ambassador to Ukraine, told me Poland may now get tougher on Ukraine’s path to joining the European Union. In short, there will be “no more romance, no more naivety”, in the Poland-Ukraine relationship, he said.
As a general rule, it’s bad news when historical issues are in the hands of politicians rather than historians, and that is what has happened here. With elections due soon in Poland and (as discussed above) in Ukraine, potentially – expect things to get worse between Warsaw and Kyiv before they get better.
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