gotchanewsdaily.com 
For Poland, the events in Volhynia were a brutal ethnic cleansing; in 2016, the Polish Parliament voted to recognize the mass killings of Poles as a “genocide of Polish people committed by Ukrainian nationalists in 1943-1945.”
In Ukraine, however, the memory of the wartime struggles to create an independent state is that of heroism and one that inspires today’s generation fighting off Russian invaders. Levkovych, the perpetrator from Uhly, has a street named after him in a Ukrainian village near Lviv.
Stepan Bandera, the far-right nationalist Ukrainian leader whose vision of an ethnically pure Ukraine inspired UPA and whose branch of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) is accused of having participated in the Holocaust alongside Nazi Germany, is celebrated as a national hero in Kyiv while many Poles see him as a war criminal. Russia also attacks the Ukrainian government for glorifying Bandera.
Still, Poland is walking on thin ice linking its otherwise justified historical demands to the issue of Ukraine’s membership talks with the EU, warned Piotr Buras, head of the European Council on Foreign Relations office in Warsaw.
“We can talk forever about Polish and Ukrainian history and where all grievances are coming from,” Buras said. “But it’s another thing to link it all with the European Union’s enlargement. Ukraine joining the EU is in the strategic interest of Poland. To say that the issue of Volhynia is more important than Ukraine’s integration with the EU is turning the matter on its head.”
Domestic political battles
Duda recently echoed the sentiment expressed by Buras.
