The Volyn tragedy in modern Ukrainian-Polish relations

Abstract

The international Ukrainian-Polish confrontation that took place in Volhynia in 1943-1944, known as the Volyn tragedy, has been the subject of controversy between Ukraine and the Republic of Poland for several decades. Despite all the efforts of international reconciliation by both the political and intellectual elites of both countries in the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century, these problems today are often at the center of social and political discourse.The purpose of the article is to retrace the evolution of socio-political discourse in Ukraine and the Republic of Poland concerning the Volyn tragedy, to analyze its consequences and impact on Ukrainian-Polish international and inter-state relations. Based on a brief historical analysis of previous events of 1918-1943, the author shows that this bloody conflict was a consequence of previous tense relations between Ukrainians and Poles. The silence surrounding the problem in Soviet times and hypertrophied interest to these events of the past in the early 1990s by both countries were stated. As a result, it led to the intensification of social and political discourse in Ukraine and the Republic of Poland, mutual claims and attempts of new counting of victims of international confrontation. The evolution of socio-political discourse and its influence on the Polish-Ukrainian relations at the level of interpersonal relations and at the level of interstate relations are shown. The novelty of the study is the analysis of the conflict between the historical memory of Ukrainians and Poles in relation to the Volyn tragedy that lays in fact that the two sides make mutual claims, considering their own side the most affected in the conflict, as well as operating with directly different figures of victims of international confrontation. This difference in interpretation of the common past, which are actualized with a certain frequency due to political manipulation of historical memory, lead to the tension in the interstate relations of Ukraine and the Republic of Poland.