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Poland has condemned a decision by the Lviv region in Ukraine to declare 2027 a year honouring the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which led the massacre of Poles during World War Two, and one of its leaders, Roman Shukhevych. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called the decision “suicidal”, saying that it harms Ukraine by making it harder for the country’s friends to support it. Foreign minister Radosław Sikorski announced that the local official responsible for pushing through the commemorations in Lviv has been banned from entering Poland. While the UPA is still remembered positively by some in Ukraine for its...

On June 27-30, 2024, tributes were paid in many places in Ukraine to the war criminal Roman Shukhevych, murderer of Jews and Poles, the nationalist Ukrainian commander who cooperated with the Nazis during World War II. To provide some historical background, Roman Shukhevych was born in 1907, graduating in 1934 from the Technical University in Lviv (then Lwow, Poland). He lived in Eastern Galicia, a multiethnic region, with a Polish, Jewish, and Ukrainian population, which at that time was a part of the newly reborn Republic of Poland. From the beginning of its foundation in Vienna in 1929, he was...