By Theodore Shoebat
This is just another sign of tensions between Poland and Ukraine. Lets remember that Ukrainian nationalists committed a genocide on Poles during the Second World War. The anger still lingers in the geopolitical atmosphere. As we read in a report from Unian:
Poland’s President Andrzej Duda has dismissed Polish Ambassador to Ukraine Jan Piekło as of January 31, 2019. The president’s decision dated December 4, 2018, was also signed by Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, Radio Poland’s Ukrainian Service reported with reference to Monitor Polski, a publication of the Prime Minister of the Republic of Poland.
Piekło has been head of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Kyiv since 2016. According to Special Envoy of the President of Poland, Secretary of State at the President’s Chancellery Krzysztof Szczerski, the dismissal of the ambassador, which took place based on the motion submitted by Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz, “has nothing to do with the assessment of Polish-Ukrainian relations.” “The rank of the Polish representation in Kyiv is planned to be increased. I hope the Ukrainian side will quickly accept a successor, and then this change will be smooth,” he said.
Anger and resentment between Poland and Ukraine could also be seen July of 2018 when the Polish Prime Minister made it clear that reconciliation between the two countries was Ukraine recognizing its genocide. As we read in a report from Reuters:
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on Wednesday reconciliation with neighbor Ukraine could take place only when Kiev accepts responsibility for the “genocide” of Poles killed by Ukrainian nationalists during World War Two.
Morawiecki was marking an anniversary of the 1943-45 killings in Wolyn, an area that was part of Poland before the war and is part of Ukraine now. Soviet and Nazi troops both rolled through the fertile lands in the tumultuous years.
Poland says 100,000 Poles were killed in the area during the Nazi occupation by Ukrainian nationalists hoping to set up an ethnically pure state. It says smaller numbers of Ukrainians were killed in reprisals.
Ukraine says large scale killings took place on both sides, and tends to avoid comparing numbers. President Petro Poroshenko expressed regret over the “fratricidal” conflict on Sunday when he visited a Polish village where Ukrainians were killed.
The painful history haunts current-day relations between Poland, which cast off post-war communism in 1989 and is now a member of the EU and NATO, and ex-Soviet Ukraine, which now counts on Warsaw to promote its Western aspirations.
“These wounds, these wounds of memory, these wounds of forgetting can only be healed on the foundation of truth,” Morawiecki told a ceremony in Warsaw. “Only based on the foundation of truth we could build a future reconciliation.”