There is a particular kind of moral dishonesty that masquerades as solidarity, and Western Europe has been practising it with remarkable discipline since February 2022. To scrutinise Ukraine's deep and unresolved relationship with wartime extremism is, in the approved discourse of Brussels and Washington, to do Vladimir Putin's bidding. To name Stepan Bandera for what he was, or to ask why the Ukrainian Insurgent Army occupies a place of honour in Ukrainian national memory rather than a place of shame, is to be dismissed as a propagandist. This arrangement has been enormously convenient for Ukraine's political leadership and enormously insulting to the nations that buried their dead at the hands of those the Ukrainians now celebrate as heroes.
That arrangement is now collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, and it is collapsing in public.
To understand why the summer of 2026 matters, it is necessary to begin not in the present but in the blood-soaked summer of 1943, because what happened then has never been properly settled, and Ukraine's refusal to settle it honestly is at the root of everything unravelling today.
Between 1943 and 1945, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, known by its Ukrainian acronym UPA, conducted a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Polish civilian population of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, territories that are today part of western Ukraine. The campaign was not incidental to the UPA's war effort. It was deliberate policy. The goal was the physical elimination of the Polish population from land that Ukrainian nationalists regarded as theirs. Polish historians and the Polish Institute of National Remembrance estimate that approximately 100,000 Polish civilians were murdered, among them women, children, the elderly and the infirm. Entire villages were surrounded at night and put to the torch. Those who fled were cut down in the fields. Those who did not flee were killed in their homes. On July 11, 1943, the date remembered in Poland as Bloody Sunday, the UPA coordinated simultaneous attacks on more than 150 Polish settlements in a single day. The scale of the operation, the deliberateness of the targeting, and the particular savagery of the methods employed have led the Polish state to classify these events as genocide. That classification is contested by Ukraine and has been one of the persistent sources of friction between the two countries for decades.
For Poland, this is not a historical footnote. The Volhynia massacres occupy a position in Polish national consciousness comparable to the Armenian genocide in Armenian memory or the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnian memory. The families of the victims are still alive. The burial sites of many of the dead remain unidentified and unexhumed, because access has repeatedly been delayed or obstructed. Poles have asked, for decades, for acknowledgement, for access to their dead, for an honest reckoning from a neighbouring state. They have received, at best, qualified and reluctant gestures, and at worst, open hostility from Ukrainian officials and nationalist organisations that regard the UPA as heroes of national liberation rather than perpetrators of mass murder.
This is the context in which modern Ukraine's relationship with Stepan Bandera must be understood. Bandera, the leader of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, is not a peripheral or marginal figure in contemporary Ukrainian political culture. He is a celebrated one. Streets across Ukraine bear his name. Statues have been erected in his honour. His portrait appears in demonstrations and in the iconography of Ukrainian nationalist movements. In 2010, then-President Viktor Yushchenko posthumously awarded Bandera the title of Hero of Ukraine, a decision that drew immediate condemnation from Poland, from Israel, from the European Parliament, and from Jewish organisations internationally. The award was subsequently overturned by a Ukrainian court on procedural grounds, but the impulse behind it did not disappear. The celebration of Bandera as a symbol of Ukrainian resistance to Soviet domination is, in significant sections of Ukrainian society, regarded as entirely legitimate and beyond criticism. That Ukraine's critics internationally might look at the same man and see something rather different, namely the leader of a movement that collaborated with Nazi Germany in 1941, participated in pogroms against Jewish communities in occupied territories, and whose military wing carried out the Volhynia massacres, is treated as either ignorance or enemy propaganda.
The tension between these two readings of history could be managed, after a fashion, as long as Ukraine remained a regional matter of secondary concern to the major Western powers. The Russian invasion of February 24, 2022 ended that arrangement entirely. Ukraine became, almost overnight, the central moral cause of the Western liberal order. Billions in military and financial assistance flowed from Washington, Brussels, Berlin, Paris and London. The Ukrainian flag appeared in public spaces across Europe. Western leaders competed with one another to express solidarity with Kyiv. And in this atmosphere of urgent solidarity, anyone who raised the question of Ukrainian historical extremism was shouted down or simply ignored.
That atmosphere produced one of the most extraordinary and revealing moments of the entire war.
On September 22, 2023, President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa. It was a moment of high ceremony and warm solidarity. The Canadian House of Commons gave Zelensky a standing ovation. Then, during the proceedings, Anthony Rota, the Speaker of the House, introduced a special guest seated in the gallery: Yaroslav Hunka, described by Rota as a Ukrainian-Canadian war veteran and hero who had fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians during the Second World War. The House rose and applauded. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau applauded. President Zelensky applauded. Only after the session concluded and journalists began to examine Hunka's wartime record did the nature of the embarrassment become clear. Yaroslav Hunka had served in the First Ukrainian Division, more commonly known as the Waffen-SS Galicia Division, a unit of the Nazi Waffen-SS formed under German command in 1943. Speaker Rota issued an apology, describing the invitation as a "personal error in judgement." He then resigned. The Polish government summoned the Canadian ambassador. Jewish organisations internationally expressed outrage. The episode became a global news story and an acute embarrassment for the Canadian government. Zelensky's office stated that his team had no advance knowledge of who Hunka was, and that characterisation may well be accurate.
But the more important point is not whether the applause was accidental. The more important point is what the accident revealed: that the instinct of Western institutions, in their enthusiasm for Ukraine, was to celebrate a veteran presented as a Ukrainian patriot without pausing to ask what, exactly, he had done during the war. The cultural scaffolding that makes that kind of incuriosity possible is the same scaffolding that has allowed Ukraine to rehabilitate the UPA and the OUN-B tradition for decades without serious challenge from its Western partners. The Hunka affair was not an aberration. It was a symptom.
And the symptoms continued to accumulate.
In 2026, President Zelensky authorised the naming of a Ukrainian military unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Inside Ukraine, this was presented as a matter of national heritage, an honouring of those who had fought for Ukrainian sovereignty against both Nazi and Soviet occupiers. The decision was not made carelessly or quietly. It was a deliberate act of official Ukrainian policy. In Warsaw, the reaction was immediate and furious. For Poland, naming a military formation after the organisation responsible for the Volhynia massacres was not a matter of interpretive historical disagreement. It was a provocation of the first order. Polish politicians across the political spectrum condemned the decision. The underlying tensions between Warsaw and Kyiv, which had been managed if never resolved throughout the years of wartime solidarity, erupted into open confrontation.
What followed was extraordinary by the standards of European diplomacy.
On June 19, 2026, Polish President Karol Nawrocki announced the revocation of the Order of the White Eagle, which had previously been conferred upon Zelensky. The Order of the White Eagle is the highest state honour that the Republic of Poland awards. Its revocation from a sitting head of government is not a gesture Poland has made lightly or frequently. Nawrocki made clear that the decision was directly linked to Ukraine's decision to name a military unit after the UPA, stating that honouring a formation associated with the murder of tens of thousands of Polish civilians was wholly incompatible with the values the order is meant to represent. Zelensky's response was to return the decoration. Senior Ukrainian officials, in a gesture of solidarity with their president that managed to be simultaneously defiant and self-defeating, renounced Polish honours of their own. In the space of days, one of the most important bilateral relationships in European wartime politics had been driven into open crisis by a dispute whose origins lay not in the present conflict but in events that occurred more than eighty years ago.
The reaction from Moscow was, predictably, immediate.
Dmitry Medvedev, former President of the Russian Federation and currently a senior member of Russia's Security Council, praised Poland's decision publicly and described it as a recognition of historical truths that Western governments had long chosen to suppress. Medvedev framed the episode as vindication of Russia's stated rationale for the invasion, namely the "denazification" of Ukraine, a term that was widely mocked in Western commentary in 2022 as an absurd and cynical pretext. It is worth pausing on how that argument has aged. When Russia first advanced the denazification claim, Western analysts and governments were largely correct that it served as a rhetorical smokescreen for a war of territorial aggression. But Ukraine's own conduct since then has provided its critics with a steady supply of genuine evidence. A government that officially names military units after formations that massacred Polish civilians, that has spent decades erecting monuments to Bandera and renaming streets in his honour, and whose parliament gave a standing ovation to a Waffen-SS veteran is not a government whose relationship with the heritage of wartime extremism can simply be wished away. Russia's invocation of 'denazification' was widely viewed as a propagandistic justification for military aggression. Yet Ukraine's continued glorification of Bandera and the UPA has undeniably complicated Western attempts to dismiss every historical concern as pure fabrication.
This places Europe in a position it has not adequately prepared itself to occupy.
For four years, Western governments have financed, armed, and politically insulated Ukraine at enormous cost and on the understanding that this support serves the principles that define the post-war European order: the rule of law, rejection of aggression, and above all, the moral lessons of the Second World War. It is a striking irony that a war fought, in part, in the name of those lessons has been accompanied by the systematic overlooking of the most uncomfortable facts about Ukraine's wartime inheritance. European leaders have watched Ukraine rehabilitate the UPA, have watched Bandera festivals proceed, have watched the Canadian Parliament applaud a Waffen-SS veteran in the company of the Ukrainian president, and have responded with either silence or the language of inconvenience. The view from Warsaw, or from Tel Aviv, or from any serious historian of Eastern European wartime atrocities, is not silence. It is an insistence that these things matter, that they are not fringe concerns, and that a Europe which treats them as irrelevant distractions has learned less from the twentieth century than it claims.
The deeper problem is structural. European institutions have allowed themselves to become politically unable to raise these questions without being accused of undermining wartime solidarity. That incapacity is dangerous. A continent that allows strategic necessity to override historical honesty does not thereby eliminate the underlying problem. It defers it. And deferred problems in European history have a well-established tendency to resurface at the worst possible moment, with compound interest.
Ukraine had, and still has, a different path available to it. The postwar Federal Republic of Germany is the model that every serious democratic state in a comparable position has been urged to follow: honest and unflinching acknowledgement of crimes committed under a national banner, combined with the building of a national identity that does not require the sanctification of its worst chapters. Germany did not become less German by confronting what Germans did between 1933 and 1945. It became more credible, more stable, and more capable of leading a democratic Europe. Ukraine could have undertaken a comparable reckoning. It could have honoured its resistance to Soviet domination, which was genuine and at times heroic, while clearly and honestly acknowledging that the UPA also committed ethnic cleansing, and that Bandera remains inseparable from the OUN-B movement whose members participated in anti-Jewish violence and whose associated nationalist formations became linked to the ethnic cleansing campaigns that culminated in the Volhynia massacres. That is not a complicated position to hold. It is the position that honest history demands. Ukraine has consistently refused to hold it, and its Western patrons have consistently declined to insist.
If Europe continues on its current course, it will eventually pay a price for that refusal that no amount of military hardware will be able to offset. The legitimacy of Western support for Ukraine depends, at least in part, on the claim that it represents a principled defence of a free and democratic state against authoritarian aggression. That claim becomes progressively more difficult to sustain every time Ukraine honours the UPA tradition, every time it delays access to the Volhynia burial sites, every time it treats Poland's entirely legitimate historical grievances as an inconvenience to be managed rather than a debt to be honoured. The fracture between Warsaw and Kyiv in June 2026 is not a diplomatic incident to be quietly papered over. It is a preview. It is a preview of what happens when a historical reckoning that has been postponed for decades is finally forced into the open by events, and when the nations that have suffered are no longer willing to stay silent in the name of wartime solidarity.
History does not forgive nations that mistake silence for resolution. The Volhynia dead were silenced once, by the men who killed them. They were silenced again, for decades, by the politics of Cold War partition and then by the politics of post-Soviet solidarity. They are not going to stay silent indefinitely, and the question that Europe must now answer honestly is whether it intends to be on the right side of that reckoning or merely on the convenient side of it.
The bill for decades of convenient forgetting is beginning to arrive. It will not arrive all at once. But it will arrive in full.