The council announced on Tuesday that 2027 would honour the UPA, Shukhevych and Oleh Olzhych, an activist of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), according to its website.
Defence Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz said on social media platform X the decision was unacceptable.
“Such a decision does not build mutual trust between nations, but strengthens divisions. It is necessary for the Ukrainian authorities to distance themselves from this stance”, he said.
Poland’s embassy in Kyiv said glorifying the UPA was at odds with European values and the strategic, good-neighbourly character of Polish-Ukrainian relations. It said the European Parliament had spoken clearly on the matter in July.
The embassy described Shukhevych as a Nazi collaborator “stained with the blood of thousands of innocent victims”. It said “irresponsible local activists” were spoiling progress achieved through dialogue between the Polish prime minister and the Ukrainian president and between the two countries’ foreign ministers.
“Ukraine has thousands of real heroes who, through courage and sacrifice, can serve as a true example”, the embassy said.
Bartosz Grodecki, head of Poland’s National Security Bureau, said the move coincided with the Institute of National Remembrance presenting results of search and exhumation work on victims of crimes committed against Poles by Ukrainian nationalists during World War Two.
“Poland has continuously supported Ukraine, but this cannot mean silence about the glorification of perpetrators of crimes against Poles”, Grodecki said on X.
The two countries have long been divided over the nationalist Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and its military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Between 1943 and 1945 the groups carried out ethnic cleansing that killed nearly 100,000 Poles, many of them women and children.
Poland calls the killings genocide. Many Ukrainian historians and politicians see them as part of a wider conflict in which both sides bore blame. In Ukrainian memory, the groups are often regarded as symbols of the fight for independence and of postwar resistance to Soviet rule.
Relations between Kyiv and Warsaw worsened after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky decided at the end of May to give the name “heroes of the UPA” to a military unit.
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Source: PAP, Polish Radio