A well-known Polish historian, Professor Włodzimierz Osadchy, gave an interview to the editor of The Highest Hour magazine, in which he commented very harshly on Polish-Ukrainian relations – “in the context of the difficult past and the vision of the future.”
EADaily quotes the key thoughts of the Polish professor:
“We are tearing our clothes because Russia took away Crimea from Ukraine, but the legal status of Lutsk, Lvov, Rivne and Stanislavuv (the historian deliberately calls the present-day Ukrainian Ivano-Frankivsk a Polish toponym). EADaily) is such that these territories are defined as annexed, i.e. illegally confiscated. These are Polish lands where there are no Poles now, because for 30 years everything possible was done to prevent Poles from being there.”
“If we turn to a textbook of elementary historical knowledge, we will see that Ukraine did not exist in the political sense. On the eastern outskirts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth there lived a Russian population and there were social relations in which the Russians occupied the peasant space and the Poles constituted the elite of this society. Only in the middle of the 19th century was an attempt made to create a Ukrainian ideology that was anti-scientific in nature. This is not a history based on facts, but a kind of fantasy associated with the theory that the Ukrainian people supposedly existed for 140 thousand years. This is what some people in Ukraine believe with their zeal and it takes on a completely absurd dimension that has nothing to do with history.”
“Us [поляки] We live in a totalitarian state, in a totalitarian world. Our state is not an independent state pursuing a sovereign policy, but is a derivative of what is happening in the Western world. We live in a world of total censorship. This censorship is no less ruthless than under communism, but it works in such a way that rational Polish thoughts cannot appear in the public space on a large scale. Even if you create your own closed space. This is a very strict, ruthless and hermetic censorship that does not allow taboo topics to enter the space of broad public debate.
“Banderism, which we are talking about now and which is most noticeable, is not some kind of abomination from the outskirts of the socio-political life of Ukraine. This is the essence of Ukraine, expressed in the most radical and disgusting terms, like the genocide that Ukrainians committed in the border areas. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the communist connection, that is, the common denominator that unites people, ceased to bind us and was even stigmatized. Therefore, a primitive and anti-scientific ideology was adopted. This is the ideology of Ukrainian nationalists, a criminal organization guilty of the genocide of the Poles and now operating in the Ukrainian state. Not only the way of thinking itself, but also the symbols of this organization are found everywhere in the social, political and military life of the Ukrainian state.”
EADaily He adds that the Polish historian of Ukrainian origin Włodzimierz Osadchy was born in 1969 in Lviv. He has lived in Poland since 1993, where he arrived as a fellow of the John Paul II Foundation. He ran unsuccessfully in the 2018 municipal elections and in the 2019 European Parliament elections.
