Twenty-one MPs from Poland’s right-wing opposition parties have signed a demand that the Polish Government organise an event to celebrate Polish Independence Day on November 11 in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, which before the Second World War was a part of Poland.
The demand was submitted as parliamentary interpellation number 19518. It reached the Sejm on August 28 and was passed to the prime minister on September 8, giving the Government 20 days to reply.
The idea has been slammed by members of Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s ruling coalition and called “madness” and “gross stupidity”, especially at a time when Ukraine is at war with Russia. It is unclear how far the signatories have the backing of their own party leaderships.
The initiator was Dariusz Matecki of Law and Justice (PiS). Of the 21 signatories, 14 sit with PiS, three with Confederation (Konfederacja), one with Development Plus (Rozwój Plus) and one with the Confederation of the Polish Crown (KKP), led by Grzegorz Braun MEP. The other two are Janusz Kowalski, who recently left PiS, and Jarosław Sachajko.
Deputy defence minister Cezary Tomczyk called the plan “gross stupidity” and asked how Poles would react if Germany tried to organise a similar march in Poland, parts of whose present territory belonged to Germany before the war.
Others have said that the proposal plays into the hands of Russian propaganda which has at various times during the war in Ukraine argued that Poland wants to take over western Ukraine to make Lviv Polish again.
Lviv was a city in which Poles formed a majority of the population before the Second World War but after the war it was taken over by the Soviet Union which resettled the Poles to the western territories Poland gained from Germany as part of the post-war redrawing of state boundaries.
According to Ukraine’s census of 2001, just under 10,000 people in Lviv declared Polish ethnicity, around 1 per cent of the population, though some estimates put the figure higher. Much bigger Polish minorities exist in the parts of Lithuania and Belarus that were part of Poland before the Second World War.
The idea of events to celebrate Polish independence came not in the form of proposed legislation or even a parliamentary resolution but an MPs’ intervention, a form of written submission or question to the government.
In the interpellation the parliamentarians called on the government to do more to support the ethnic Polish community that still lives in Lviv, arguing that neither the Polish nor the Ukrainian state does enough to help them preserve and celebrate their identity.
They next noted that the Polish state provides funding for Ukrainian organisations and events in Poland, including celebrations of Ukrainian Independence Day on August 24.
In order for there to be symmetry the MPs called upon the Polish Government to “organise official celebrations of Polish Independence Day in Lviv, including a Polish Independence March through the streets of the city” on November 11. This would be “a concrete sign of remembrance and solidarity with Poles living in Ukraine”, reads the interpellation.
That lawmakers from four parties of the Right have acted without a clear signal of approval from at least three of their leaderships is another demonstration of the fragmented state of the Polish Right. Braun’s Confederation of the Polish Crown broke with Confederation last year, and this summer some 40 MPs left PiS with former prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who in August set up the Development Plus club, now the third largest in the Sejm behind Tusk’s Civic Coalition and PiS.
The joint leader of Confederation Krzysztof Bosak, who leads the grouping’s National Movement (Ruch Narodowy) wing, when asked about the idea on September 16 poured cold water on it. He told commercial broadcaster RMF FM that he had only heard about the proposal the day before, called it a “stunt” and added that he felt that it was “unnecessary”.
But he also claimed that it was really just an attempt to question support for Ukrainian identity promoting events in Poland.
“I think the point is to draw attention to the fact that Polish institutions are participating in the celebration of Ukraine’s Independence Day in Warsaw, and that there should be some symmetry,” said Bosak.
He said the appeal should be directed at Ukrainian institutions rather than the Polish foreign ministry and that, if reciprocity were the point, Kyiv would be the more logical venue.
Nevertheless, Bosak’s Confederation has in the past intervened in Ukraine. Last year the leader of the libertarian wing of the party Sławomir Mentzen was slammed by Lviv mayor Andriy Sadovyi for criticising a monument to Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera when visiting the city.
Bandera is regarded as a freedom fighter against the USSR in Ukraine, whereas Poles regard him as the instigator of the Volhynia massacre in which around 100,000 civilians were killed during ethnic cleansing which took place with the participation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the military wing of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. Poland regards the Volhynia massacre as genocide whereas Ukraine argues that Polish partisans also killed Ukrainian partisans and civilians.
The dispute is a cause of continued tension between the two countries and was inflamed this year when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky named a Ukrainian military unit after the “heroes of the UPA”.
The Polish Government is expected to reject the idea of any Polish independence day activities in Ukraine as it is engaged in an effort to persuade both Ukraine and western European governments to include Poland in future negotiations on ending Russia’s war against Ukraine.
In an interview with European Pravda, a Ukrainian news outlet, foreign minister Radosław Sikorski on September 16 highlighted Poland’s position as a country bordering war-torn Ukraine and its role as a transit hub for Western aid to Ukraine, including the logistics hub at Rzeszów Airport near the Ukrainian border. He spoke on the sidelines of the Yalta European Strategy meeting in Kyiv.
Sikorski said: “Poland is the only country in Europe that borders both Russia and Ukraine. We also carry 95 per cent of all assistance to Ukraine as a transit country. And we provide security for that hub, without which you wouldn’t get the stuff.”
Speaking about Polish-Ukrainian historical disputes, Sikorski called for reconciliation, noting that Poland and Ukraine have resumed exhumations of victims in Volhynia and that work is also underway to exhume the remains of Ukrainians killed in Poland decades ago. He also told Kyiv to “be careful how you choose your heroes”.
Addressing the west Europeans Sikorski said that the days when decisions made about Eastern Europe were made elsewhere were “bad history”.
Neither Tusk’s Civic Coalition (KO) nor the parties of the Left has ever been supportive of independence day marches even in Poland itself.
Once activists from the political Right became dominant in organising independence day marches with nationalist slogans appearing on banners the KO and the Left began attacking this form of celebration of Poland’s independence day.
The organisers of the Independence Day March during a previous spell of Tusk’s rule (2007-2015) claimed that the security services provoked disturbances during the march. In 2018, under PiS, KO’s Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski tried to ban the event, only for a court to overturn the decision.
Though since the centenary celebrations of Poland regaining its independence in 2018 the march has become more peaceful and has not been actively contested by the current Tusk administration.
The Tusk administration’s rhetoric has been supportive of Ukraine in its war against Russia but in reality it has not been as supportive as was the last PiS government and the last PiS allied president Andrzej Duda.
Military aid for Ukraine under the Tusk government is considerably smaller than it was in the first two years of the war when PiS was in power and support for Ukrainian refugees that was very generous in those years has also been reduced.
This is partly explained by the fact that both Polish public opinion and the Polish political Right have cooled in their enthusiasm for Ukraine and Ukrainians in general.
The scale of the migration, with the numbers of Ukrainians in Poland doubling from a million to two million, the presence of Ukrainian young men avoiding the draft to fight for their country and the increased number of crimes connected to that migrant minority have undoubtedly been factors in changing attitudes.
Other factors include the historical disputes over Volhynia and the pressure felt by Poland’s farmers and hauliers when faced with Ukrainian competition benefitting from the EU allowing them to trade freely on EU markets without the need to meet all the requirements which the member states have to honour.
Poland back in 2022-2023 was a strong supporter of Ukraine joining both the EU and NATO. Today, though, the opposition allied President Karol Nawrocki elected last year has made it clear that he will not support either EU or NATO membership for Ukraine until historical disputes are settled and the country has attained the standards which Poland has to meet to be a member of both the international alliances. He first set out that position in January 2025, saying he did not envisage Ukraine in either body “until important civilisational issues for Poland are resolved”.
Nevertheless, it has been a tenet of Polish foreign policy since the Second World War to oppose any talk of changing borders in Europe. This stems from the fact that the country until it joined NATO and the EU felt its present border in the west with Germany could be questioned by those in Germany who want the return of the territories that country lost as a result of its defeat in the Second World War.
Polish politicians have since the return to democracy in 1989 avoided making any moves that could be seen as making territorial claims against Ukraine or Belarus for fear that these could in future lead to territorial claims against it in the west.
