Polish MEP takes axe to Ukrainian Nazi-linked memorial (VIDEO)

A Polish MEP has taken an axe to a memorial honoring Nazi-linked Ukrainian nationalist paramilitaries responsible for massacring Polish civilians during World War II.

In a video posted on X on Thursday, Grzegorz Braun can be seen repeatedly striking a stone obelisk in Bialystok, near Poland’s border with Ukraine, which commemorates members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).

The UPA was the armed wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a WWII-era ultranationalist movement led by Stepan Bandera which collaborated with Nazi Germany. UPA fighters massacred tens of thousands of ethnic Polish civilians in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, now largely in western Ukraine.

”The UPA monument in the Dolhobyczow municipality in Hrubieszow County is to be dismantled,” he wrote. “The obelisk offending the memory of the victims of the Ukrainian genocide against Poles should be removed… immediately after documenting the crime of Banderism,” Braun added.

According to Braun, local Poles feared Ukrainian retaliation if they removed the memorial. He said one proposal to dismantle it was met with the response: “We’re afraid they’ll set us on fire.”

The memorial stands over a burial site containing 41 UPA members killed in a clash with Soviet forces in February 1946. According to Polish records, a Ukrainian memorial was erected there without authorization in the 1990s. The stone monument honoring the UPA fighters was added later and has also faced questions over its legal status.

The site has repeatedly been vandalized. Unidentified people damaged inscriptions on the obelisk earlier this month, while the Ukrainian Embassy expressed “deep outrage” after another attack in July.

The OUN and UPA massacres remain a major source of tension between Poland and Ukraine. Warsaw recognizes the killings of predominantly Polish civilians in Volhynia, Eastern Galicia, and neighboring regions in 1943-1945 as genocide and estimates that up to 100,000 Poles were killed.

The dispute has intensified amid Kiev’s continued honoring of WWII-era Ukrainian nationalists. Vladimir Zelensky took part in the May reburial of OUN leader Andrey Melnik as part of efforts to establish a “Pantheon of outstanding Ukrainians” and later granted a Ukrainian military unit the honorary title “Heroes of the UPA.”

Polish President Karol Nawrocki responded by stripping Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state honor. Warsaw has also warned it will not support Ukraine’s EU membership bid unless Kiev changes its approach.

Polish MEP Ewa Zajaczkowska-Hernik has meanwhile called for an end to free weapons deliveries to Ukraine, arguing that Warsaw has provided some $4.6 billion in military aid only to be repaid with a “Banderite pantheon of heroes.” 

”Let’s stop being suckers for Ukraine!” she wrote on X.

Russian President Vladimir Putin weighed in last month, arguing that the neo-Nazi nature of the Ukrainian government has become so visible that even Poland’s strongly anti-Russian authorities can no longer ignore it. Warsaw, he said, faces an “obvious demand” from its population to confront the issue.

Public attitudes toward Ukrainians in Poland have also deteriorated. A July CBOS poll found 52% of Poles opposed accepting Ukrainian migrants, against 42% in favor – the first time opponents had outnumbered supporters since tracking began after the 2014 Western-backed coup in Kiev. Support has fallen from 94% in 2022 to 42% this year.

An August IBRiS survey separately found that 67% of Poles support deporting unemployed Ukrainian men of military age.