Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has said that Ukraine will not get Poland's consent to join the European Union unless it meets Warsaw's expectations on how it should deal with Ukrainian nationalists' World War 2-era atrocities against Poles.

Poland has been one of Kyiv's most dedicated allies since Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022. Polish authorities have sent huge volumes of military equipment and welcomed hundreds of thousands of refugees.

Warsaw has long said that it is in Poland's best interest for Ukraine to stop Russia so that Poles do not need to fight the Russian army themselves on their home soil one day.

But Ukraine's sacrifice of blood for the sake of Poland's security is not going to set the two neighbours' complicated historical record straight once and for all despite Ukrainian officials hinting at exactly that.

It's not simply "history"

While on a visit to Poland, Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said last week that history belongs to history now that Ukraine is struggling against Russian aggression.

"If we were to start digging into history today, the quality of the conversation would be entirely different, and we could go very deep into the past, bringing up the wrongs that Poles did to Ukrainians and Ukrainians did to Poles," Kuleba said.

The Ukrainian minister also said that the "focus should be on building the future together and leaving history to the historians".

The statement rubbed Poland up very much the wrong way.

"My assessment of what the Ukrainian minister said is clearly negative,"  Tusk said on August 30 , adding that Ukraine will have to "meet Poland's expectations, not so much about digging into history, but rather about shaping our relationship based on the truth of that history".

The Polish PM also said that "the EU wouldn't have come into existence without reconciliation between Germans and French or Germans and Poles".

"Ukrainians need to understand that joining the EU means entering a space with standards related to political and historical culture," Tusk also said.

Tragic ties

The often tragic history of Poland and Ukraine goes back several centuries. Before Ukraine's national identity began to be forged, the Ukrainian lands had been under Polish and Russian rule. Poles held the economic and cultural hegemony over the then-largely peasant Ukrainian population.

Ukrainians' inferior position in Poland – in the first republic that collapsed in the late 18th century and in the short-lived second republic that existed between the end of World War 1 and the outbreak of World War 2 – was an important driver of the nationalist movement, which was struggling to establish a Ukrainian state.

Unfortunately for Ukrainians, their efforts first came head-on against Poland's efforts to build a state after World War 1.

Later, when the Nazis invaded the USSR in 1941, some Ukrainian nationalists considered it a new opportunity to build a country in a sort of alliance with Hitler (who considered Ukrainian aspirations as nothing else but helpful tactics to employ against the Soviet Union).

The totality of World War 2 turned out conducive to Ukrainian nationalists' brutal crackdown on Poles living in Western Ukraine at the time. Historians estimate 60,000 Poles died in the killings that lasted with varying intensity between 1943 and 1945.

Despite the two nations now on their best terms in history – because of Poland's unequivocal support for Ukraine in the wake of the Russian invasion in 2022 – the atrocities remain a dividing point.

Poland considers the massacres genocide and has long said that Ukraine should formally apologise. But the wartime nationalist movement is an important part of Ukraine's history for its role in building its national identity, making it difficult for Kyiv to formally acknowledge its crimes.

Ukraine – as expressed by Kuleba – would rather delegate the debate on the atrocities to historians. That would be merely glossing over an important part of Polish history and doing the victims an injustice, Warsaw invariably says in reaction.

Apart from an apology, Poland demands that the killing sites are examined so that the remains of the victims are given a  "dignified burial". Work is already underway on some sites.

Past and present

All that presents a political problem for the incumbent Polish government – just as it did to its predecessors.

Last week, Tusk made it clear that coming to terms with history will be as important for Ukraine as meeting the standard requirements of an EU membership.

"Ukraine will not become a member of the European Union without Poland's consent. Ukraine must meet various standards—this isn't just about borders, trade, or legal-economic standards. It also involves what I would call cultural-political standards," Tusk said.

In contrast, Szymon Holownia, the Polish parliamentary speaker and the leader of the Third Way, one of the parties making up the ruling coalition, suggested that he'd rather see Ukraine in the EU first.

"We will [discuss history] in the safe ecosystem in the EU when there is no killing in the streets by the dictator in the Kremlin," Holownia told the Globsec forum in Bratislava, Slovakia, last week.

"We won't solve the problems of the past if we mix it with Ukraine's position now," Holownia also said.

There is no shortage of present problems, either, related to the conditions on which Ukraine joins the EU one day (it took Poland over a decade to do that).

Polish truckers have long complained about cheap Ukrainian competition pricing them out of the EU market, for example.

But the real problem to solve will be agricultural subsidies and what will happen to Europe's agricultural and food businesses if Ukraine joins the bloc, gaining an unfettered and duty-free access to the market. 

This would necessitate a radical reform of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy since Ukraine would be entitled to a massive €186bn in subsidies if it joined under current rules, according to estimates. 

Just the agricultural subsidies for Ukraine under the CAP might cost €16bn a year, half as much again as the €11bn a year that Poland currently receives from the EU as grants for everything, including both agriculture and infrastructure subsidies.

Polish farmers are a formidable political force. While Ukraine's accession to the EU is many years away still, it already is creating a political current shaping Polish politics here and now.

“Ukraine cannot be admitted to the EU until Warsaw and Kyiv resolve the issue of the Volhynia massacres,” deputy Polish Prime Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, hailing from the Polish People’s Party, the choice of many Polish farmers, said in July.