Don’t be offended by the words of President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Poland is not ready for war. And Karol Nawrocki is discouraging and wants to get rid of those from whom we could learn.

By Myroslav Cech and Yaroslav Kursky

Oct 10, 2025

On Saturday, September 20, a homeless man beat Zenobia Zachek on a bus in Warsaw. Ms. Zenobia dared to reprimand him because he was swearing and picking on an older passenger, a Ukrainian woman who spoke Ukrainian. The homeless man roared in his native language that “there is Poland here,” that it was Volhynia, that there were Bandera members, and that she should “get the hell out” of Poland. Ms. Zenobia was hit in the head for interfering in “what was not her business.” Blood flowed from her nose. Her fellow passengers were stunned and froze: their noses were in their phones, their eyes were out the window.

In Wroclaw, someone ripped off the license plates from a Ukrainian car and wrote with spray paint: “To the front.” Maybe a Russian agent did it, maybe not, but the comments from Polish Internet users are already horrifying in themselves. On September 5, a group of men in Białolenka cursed and beat Ukrainians for national reasons. There have been dozens of such examples in recent weeks alone, and there is no point in multiplying them here. Poland, 2025. Pre-war time.

How little it took for Brown’s language to take root, talking about the Ukrainization and Banderization of Poland. How easy it was to turn Putin’s war victims into “Ukrainians,” into aliens who beg for help, avoid battle, graze on something other than their own, and live in luxury. It is worth looking at the Bronisław Geremek Foundation’s report on disinformation about Ukrainian refugees in Poland.

President Karol Nawrocki vetoed the law on 800+ for foreigners when society approved it. Now, Ukrainians, in order to receive this assistance, will have to pay taxes, have a PESEL number and send their children to school. And, of course, they will have to work. And how is a Ukrainian woman with two small children, whose husband is fighting at the front, supposed to do this? Poles, in order to receive 800+, do not have to work. What is allowed, sir…. After all, we are at home.

Nawrocki signed the new law on aid to Ukraine – but for the last time because he will not agree to any more support. Starting next year, Ukrainian war refugees, mainly women, children and the elderly, must stay in Poland “on general grounds”. That is, they must receive a residence permit for a certain period or stay in our country for 90 days within six months. For the Polish president, the war is over. Meanwhile, the European Union countries have extended the right of residence for refugees from Ukraine until 2027.

Experts unanimously believe that limiting the right to 800+ will bring minimal savings to the state. No one estimates the losses – and they will be high.

Not only in the social sphere, because the anti-emigrant spiral is being unleashed, but also in the economic sphere, because many Ukrainians who are needed on the labor market will simply

leave. Our times are pre-war, but we are already grateful to war refugees. Let their compatriots now gnaw at them. Ukraine is bleeding in war, is under continuous shelling from missiles and drones, and is getting into debt for defense purposes. Now, before that, it will also have to organize social assistance and build temporary housing for war refugees returned from well-fed, fraternal Poland. Poland, which will soon join the G-20 – the group of twenty richest countries in the world. Poland, whose sovereignty currently rests on the shoulders of a Ukrainian soldier.

“Debanderization” and the “Volyn massacre”, that is, reconciliation in Polish

Our old grievances are more important to us than the current traumas of Ukrainians. In the war-torn country, meanwhile, the exhumations of victims of the UPA’s ethnic cleansing are ongoing. This was supposed to be a condition and a gateway to reconciliation. But is it really so?

In the fourth year of the war, the Polish Sejm on June 4 unanimously elevated July 11 to the rank of a national holiday. This is the democrats’ response to the radicalization of public sentiment towards Ukrainians. It is not enough that we have a National Day of Remembrance for Poles – victims of the genocide committed by the OUN and UPA in the eastern lands of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – now it is also an official state holiday.

Nobody is bothering with the details that it was Polish citizens who killed Polish citizens. The previous president, Andrzej Duda, signed the law – even though it contradicts the constitution, which defines the Polish people as a community of all citizens, without distinguishing between Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, Belarusians, Jews or Silesians.

Instead, we should remember only the ethnic Polish victims of the massacre, but not the Ukrainian or Jewish victims – although they were also citizens of the Second Polish Republic. Where then is the equality of citizens before the law? Does this mean that we are throwing national minorities out of the scope of Polishness? Can only an ethnic Pole be a citizen of Poland, as the obstetrician of Polish nationalism, Roman Dmowski, wanted?

By the way, Dmowski, like Putin, believed that Ukrainians were not a separate people, but Ruthenians or Little Russians, and that they should cooperate with Russia in this matter.

Where has Polish counterintelligence gone when Russian agents of influence walk through the Sejm like Nevsky Prospect?

Earlier, under patriotic blackmail from the right, the Sejm unanimously adopted an amendment to the law on the Institute of National Remembrance, which introduces a penalty of three years in prison for doubting the crimes of Ukrainian nationalists. The Constitutional Tribunal questioned this wording because the politicians did not write who exactly they were talking about. In addition, it is known that Poles are angels by nature, they did not kill anyone – and even if they killed Ukrainians, it was only for the purposes of self-defense. And if someone thinks differently – the prosecutor will deal with them. So, is this how we should investigate the painful Polish-Ukrainian history?

During the election campaign, Navrotsky cynically inflamed the Volyn wound. He set exhumations and “de-Banderization” as a condition for Ukraine’s accession to NATO and the

European Union. We have not heard that he changed his mind after the elections, although the exhumations continue. On the contrary, twice over the past four months he has spoken in the Mecca of the Kresy circles – at the monument to the Volyn massacre in Domosław in the Carpathian region.

The 14-ton monument by Andrzej Pityński is as large (20 meters high) as it is ax-like in its message. It has the shape of an eagle standing in flames, with a cross carved into its body, and three-pronged pitchforks sticking out of it – symbolizing the trident – on which a child is perched. At the base is a mother with a child in her arms in flames, as well as the heads of children perched on pickets – also in flames. The names of the settlements where the UPA murders took place are visible on the eagle’s wings.

Why do Poles believe that Ukrainians are attacking us?

Nawrocki speaks of genocide and puts forward the highest estimate – 120 thousand Poles, although this is not supported by scientific research. One can argue about the numbers. Identifying victims and counting them is the duty of historians, although this will not change the facts. There were murders committed by the UPA. Criminal nationalism was and is a disease of many peoples – including Ukrainians. But there were also murders of Ukrainian civilians by Poles. There were forced deportations to the Soviets, the “Vistula” operation. We have a complex balance of mutual grievances. And Nawrocki does not talk about this. Is this the tone of reconciliation? Or confrontation?

We hear from politicians that Poles have nothing to apologize to Ukrainians for, and the formula “we forgive and ask for forgiveness” is empty words. Although this was called for by the democratic opposition, the Church, John Paul II, and Polish presidents – in particular Lech Kaczyński.

Who benefits from this?

In a phone conversation with Donald Trump on August 13, before the summit in Alaska, Nawrotski mentioned the 105th anniversary of the Battle of Warsaw – that is, the victory over the Bolsheviks. We do not know whether he added that without the heroism of the Sichkovyky (Ukrainan Riflemen), who covered the rear of the retreating Polish army, this victory would probably not have happened. The Poles rewarded Symon Petliura with the internment of his units, and later the Polish-Soviet division of Ukraine at the Riga conference.

The Endeks reached an agreement with the Soviets. Then the Endeks from the Hieno-Piast government, not wanting to annoy the Soviets, forced Petliura to leave Poland in gratitude for the cooperation of our peoples. He was killed in exile in France.

It is breathtaking how easily short-sighted national egoism, megalomania and, of course, an unjustified sense of superiority over our fellow people flourish today. Russian disinformation reigns on the Internet – it intoxicates, provokes and incites. But why is it so effective? Why do so many Poles believe that Ukrainian drones attacked us and that Ukraine is “dragging us into war”? Why is the soil for provocations, on which seeds of hatred fall, so fertile?

This is a topic of collective therapy. The problem is that therapy only makes sense when we agree on the facts about ourselves. And with this, to put it mildly, we are worse off. This is even understandable. Just as no French historian has managed to summarize the issue of the Vichy regime collaborating with Hitler, and the American historian Robert Paxton had to do it for them, so no Polish historian has touched on the watercress fable and Sienkiewicz’s Easter eggs.

Poles in the clutches of pseudohistory

Only Daniel Beauvois could have done it. However, his magnum opus, The Ukrainian Triangle, about the relations that prevailed in Volhynia, Kyiv region, and Russian Podilia did not make its way to public opinion. The book was too big, too complicated, too truthful.

Beauvois, far from Marxist sympathies, spent 25 years in Russian and Ukrainian archives. He describes the relations that prevailed in the estates of the then Polish nobility. They resembled slavery on cotton plantations in Louisiana. The Polish lord was a god, and the Ruthenian peasant was a cattleman; he could be beaten and even killed with impunity. Beauvois writes about the hatred between the Polish Catholic court and the Russian Orthodox village. The accumulation of religious, class and ethnic tensions from time to time led to riots, which were bloodily suppressed. The Polish nobility did not hesitate to call for the help of Russian gendarmes to disperse the “rudeness” with whips or even sabers.

“I consider the debunking of pseudohistory to be the most urgent task for historians of Central and Eastern Europe. Why should we clothe painful memory in metaphysics? The fight against national megalomania requires sobriety and reason, not patriotic exaltation,” said Beauvois.

The researcher finally formulates a thesis about the Polish colonization of Ukraine – which seems incredible to us Poles. How is that possible? How can a people that has been oppressed for centuries, that is proud of not having its own colonies – because it was too weak for that, although the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had great ambitions – oppress other peoples? As we can see, it can – even if it was not a conquest by fire and sword, but rather had the character of a gradual assimilation of the Russian elites to Polishness and the displacement of Orthodoxy in favor of Catholicism.

This “sucking out” of the elites, which also affected Belarusians and Lithuanians, caused these countries to build their literature, culture, state ideology, and national identity only at the end of the 19th century – in opposition to Poland. In Ukraine, in particular, this fertilized the formation of a radical nationalist trend, with all its fatal consequences.

So, doesn’t this fertile soil today, on which the seeds of Russian propaganda fall, come from our post-colonial superiority complex? The superiority of the master over the rascal? After all, Ukraine is a wasteland. Our “Polish wasteland.”

“Ukrainians must be absorbed.” They liquidated self-government, sent troops for pacification

We are talking about Polish society, although, of course, there is no such thing as “we”. Some think this way, others think differently, but there is no doubt that the anti-Ukrainian trend is growing. The right has abandoned the “poisoned” legacy of Jerzy Giedroyc and Juliusz

Mieroszewski and their ULB (Ukraine-Lithuania-Belarus) doctrine, that is, the recognition of the right of Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Belarusians to self-determination. Now we must rely on national egoism and assertiveness towards Kyiv. Dmowski’s coffin has come to life, the spirit of the late thirties’ sanation has come to life.

If the First Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Polish landowners did not leave behind good memories during the partitions, the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth did not correct this. Although it could have – and was even obliged to do so by the post-Versailles Council of Ambassadors, which entrusted it with the temporary administration of Eastern Galicia.

• It was to enjoy the same autonomy that had been established in Silesia.
• In the Ternopil, Lviv, and Stanislav voivodeships, there were to be sejmiki divided into two levels of curia – Polish and Ukrainian.
• Decisions were to be made jointly.
• A Ukrainian university was to be established in Lviv.
• Ukrainian was to be an equal official language in these three voivodeships.
• A ban on state colonization of lands should have been in effect.

The law that was supposed to implement these obligations was never passed. The authorities renamed Eastern Galicia Eastern Lesser Poland. Instead of autonomy, the colonization and Polonization of all of Western Ukraine, including Volhynia, began – in the spirit of Roman Dmowski’s incorporation concept.

First, to dominate the Ukrainians, then to make them a minority in their own land, and finally to absorb this minority. On the lands parceled out after the agrarian reform, new villages were founded – entirely Polish. The land from the parceling was given mainly to Polish settlers, which incited neighborly envy and hidden hatred. Repeated pacification actions by the Polish Army, harassment of Ukrainian elites, liquidation of public organizations, self-government and cooperation completed the job.

Let’s dwell longer on the realities of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. We were a sovereign state, masters in our own country, and we ourselves shaped our policy towards minorities. Here, we can no longer blame anyone. There were no invaders. This is our responsibility.

First Zaolzie, then Lithuania. Obsession with power – like Mussolini

In 1938, the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, together with Adolf Hitler, participated in the division of Czechoslovakia, when Polish troops occupied Zaolzie. A nationalist euphoria reigned among the people. Similar to the one that erupted among the Italians after Mussolini’s conquest of Ethiopia, as well as among the Germans and Austrians after the Anschluss of Austria.

Soon Poland issued an ultimatum to tiny Lithuania. It was then that “the streets of Polish cities were filled with marches chanting: ‘Leader, lead us to Kovno! [Kaunas],’ as if the Polish national emblem featured not a white eagle but a goat named Matolka,” wrote Jan Józef Lipski.

By the late 1930s, the obsession with Poland as a great power had already blossomed among the sanitization elites. The Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was to become the leader of the so-called Third Europe, stretching from Finland through the Baltics, Hungary, and Romania to the Adriatic and the Black Sea. No one thought about the fact that other countries did not want this.

It is not difficult to find modern elements of this operetta repertoire in the activities of Andrzej Duda, which he proudly called the foreign policy of the presidential palace. It was eventually picked up by the government of Mateusz Morawiecki. After all, foreign policy as a mimetic imitation of a mossy and compromised sanation did not come from nowhere. The elites of the Law and Justice party also had their obsession with great power.

The late Professor Waldemar Paruch was a researcher of the political practice of Sanation. It was no coincidence that he became the head of Morawiecki’s “brain of the state” – the Center for Strategic Analysis. He wrote the monograph “From State Consolidation to National Consolidation. National Minorities in the Political Thought of the Pilsudczyk Camp (1926–1939)”. As during the decline of Sanation, PiS’s consolidation of the state took place according to the recipe “divide and rule, totalize the state and unite with the far right”. Paruch knew what he was talking about.

World masters of nose-picking. Zelensky is right not only about drones

Historical analogies can be misleading, but there are some that cannot be ignored. It is worth looking at them closely – as a warning to fate.

Comparing the “pre-war times”, that is, those that immediately preceded the September defeat of 1939, with the current pre-war times of Anno Domini 2025, we can recall several interesting facts:

• The Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth produced about 100,000 artillery pieces per year, and now we produce more than half that – 30,000–40,000 per year. This is suddenly enough for several days of military operations.
• The pre-war navy had 18 relatively modern units, today the Polish navy has 10 – and they are mostly outdated.
• Back then we had 950,000 soldiers in reserve, now we have a maximum of 550,000.

We do not compare aviation, artillery, tanks, armored vehicles, and missile forces in order to avoid misleading conclusions given the enormous technological progress. It is known, after all, that we are beginning to hastily build anti-drone defense with the help of Ukrainians experienced in this field.

There is no need to be offended by the words of President Volodymyr Zelensky – perhaps not very diplomatic, but everyone, except for the Minister of Defense and the President, feels that they are somehow painfully true. So, comparing the Ukrainian and Polish air defense systems in an interview with Sky News, Zelensky said: “This is not a message to our Polish friends – they are not at war, so it is clear that they are not ready for such things. But even if you compare: 810 drones, of which we shot down more than 700, and they had, I think, 19 drones and shot down four. They had neither missile attacks nor ballistics at that time. And, of course, they will not be able to save people if a massive attack occurs.”

A week later, Zelensky reported that more than 90 Russian drones were heading to Poland, 70 of which were shot down by Ukrainians over their own territory.

There is no point in snapping at Zelensky, Mr. Minister and President, because the only thing that has not changed since pre-war times is our nose-poking. We have no equal in this. In 1939, we were “strong, united and ready” and were not supposed to give up a single button. But before it came to the point, the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigliy, although he believed so much in the strength of his army, ordered the evacuation of his valuable movable property, furniture, equipment and paintings by a special military convoy to Romania in August 1939. After the attack of Hitler’s Germany, he and his staff, starting from September 10, went to Kut for his furniture and crossed the state border over the Cheremosh bridge. The army had no communication with the Commander-in-Chief, because in the rush and chaos, the staff officers lost the ciphers and field communication codes somewhere.

Today we also trumpet to the whole world that we have the strongest army in NATO, that we pass the exam, that we spend 5 percent of GDP on defense (um, before the war it was 10 percent), that a Polish pilot will fly even on a barn door, that we will not give up a single inch of Polish land… But what do we know about our army? We know as much as it has been tested. And our army has not been tested – and let there be no such need.

Vindication and Polonization through the Burning of Churches

Let’s take a closer look at the pre-war times, at the mindset of the time – especially in one aspect: the attitude towards Ukrainians. The sources are taken from the collections of the Archive of New Acts in Warsaw, the Central Military Archive in Rembertów, and the archives in Lviv.

What was the Polish government, its local administration, and the generals and colonels doing on the eve of the war? In 1939, the Ukrainian question did not seem as important for the country’s security as it does today. And yet, every attack on the Ukrainian minority was a service to the Soviets, whose propaganda falsely claimed that the invasion of September 17 was aimed precisely at protecting persecuted Ukrainians and Belarusians. We have already mentioned the repeated pacifications of Ukrainian villages carried out by the Polish army, the arrests of intellectuals and public figures. But in 1938, a new dynamic began: from May to July in the Chełm region and Southern Podlasie, the Polish authorities coordinated the destruction or burning of 127 Orthodox churches, chapels, and houses of prayer – including many architectural monuments. A group of workers arrived in the villages under the protection of the police or troops – and usually the job was completed within a few weeks. Rebellious believers were beaten

and brought to trial. Icons were destroyed, monuments of spiritual culture were looted, iconostases were smeared. Some of the shrines were converted into Roman Catholic churches. All this took place within the framework of the revindication-polonization campaign.

“Vindicative” – because they claimed that the majority of the population was a thoroughly Russified boyar class and Polish gentry from the countryside, who, with a little encouragement, would return to the embrace of their motherland.

“Polonization” – this does not need to be explained. The Polish state was to be ethnically homogeneous according to the Endek model: a Catholic Pole. The government promised land to those “Poles” who would “return to their mother,” that is, to the bosom of Catholicism.

After the destruction of the churches, the Ruthenians/Ukrainians were forced to attend services in Roman Catholic churches. The church was rubbing its hands, because the police and the army helped it in converting the infidels. The priests carried out mass conversions without unnecessary ceremonies. The number of “Poles” increased, the number of churches decreased.

The Polonization campaign of 1938–1939 was in full swing in all eastern voivodeships. In January 1939, instructions to the command of Corps District No. VI of the Polish Army in Lviv regarding the “strengthening of Polishness” in the Ternopil voivodeship were recommended to complete the campaign by the end of 1941 in order to be in time for a new population census. It was ordered to “break the Ukrainian terror that would rage against activists and new converts [Poles] at any cost. It was proposed to increase the number of State Police posts, introduce collective responsibility, etc.”

“To the non-Polish population – only in Polish.” Who does Przemysław Czarnek remind you of?

Only one high-ranking official of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – a friend of Józef Piłsudski, the Volyn voivode Henryk Józefowski – pursued a policy of dialogue with local Ukrainians and relied on their state assimilation. However, after the death of the marshal, Józefowski’s position in Volyn began to weaken. Opponents accused him of “favoring Ukrainians too much”. He himself resigned precisely in protest against the campaign to destroy churches. It is believed that Józefowski’s “Volyn experiment” – the complete opposite of the pacification policy of the sanation colonels, was one of the most consistent and complex attempts to resolve the Ukrainian question in the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

After Józewski’s departure, a five-year plan for the “Polonization Action of Volhynia and Kholmshchyna” appeared. It stipulated that by 1944 Poles would become the majority in Volhynia – where in 1939 Ukrainians made up about 70 percent of the population, “Polish bastions” would be created and, what is especially cunning, a regional version of Ukrainian national identity, different from the identity of Ukrainians in Eastern Galicia.

However, the results of the campaign consistently fell short of expectations. Only 10 percent of the Orthodox in the Kholm region were convinced to change their religion. Meanwhile, the army was counting on the conversion of as many as 350,000 people in Volhynia, Kholm region, and Podlasie. The new directives therefore ordered the administration to be purged of people of non-Polish origin.

The leader of the redress action in the Lublin region, Colonel Marian Turkowski, emphasized on January 24, 1939, that “in Poland, only Poles are masters, full citizens, and only they have the right to vote. Everyone else is just tolerated.”

In his directives, he stated: “To create among the Polish masses a superiority complex towards the non-Polish population. The Polish language should be a manifestation of both cultural and civic superiority. A Pole must address the non-Polish population only in Polish. And under no circumstances may a state or local government official use a language other than Polish.”

On February 23, 1939, in the Lublin Voivodeship Administration, representatives of the government, the army, and the local administration consulted on how to solve the problem of “Ukrainism.” Lublin Voivode Jerzy Albin de Tramecourt postulated a program of settling the Polish gentry in the countryside. He said that it was necessary to “break up historically established clusters of Ukrainians!” The entire Lublin and Chelm regions were to become completely free of Orthodox and Ukrainians.

Hitler and Stalin did not allow this idea to be completed. In his Ukrainian phobia, Voivode de Tramecourt was matched only by his worthy successor, Przemysław Czarnek. It is enough to trace his actions and statements regarding Ukrainians during the period when he was the Voivode of Lublin. After the war, he calmed down, but only a little. Then the question returns like a mantra: Cui bono? Who benefited from this?

In March and April 1939, the “mass stage” of the revindication and Polonization campaign began. Lieutenant Colonel Stanisław Sosabowski – yes, the same famous commander of the 1st Parachute Brigade during World War II – was its coordinator in the southeastern Lublin region until March 1939.

In his memorandum to the authorities, he encouraged them to “follow inertia” after the occupation of Zaolzie. He wrote that “there are conditions for almost complete vindication of the so-called minorities of this territory” and that “strength and consistency” were needed.

He warned against “indecision, which causes incalculable losses to the movement,” and reminded that “a mass conversion to the Roman Catholic faith, which in this territory is identified with nationality,” is necessary.

In 1939, conversions became massive – the aforementioned Colonel Turkovsky reported that from March 24 to April 2, 8,000 Orthodox were “reclaimed” to Roman Catholicism.

These events were separated from the German aggression by five months, and from the Soviet invasion by another 17 days. And yet the leading Polish rehabilitation found no better occupation than to “vindicate” and Polonize the Ukrainians in the Lemko region, the Kholm region, Eastern Galicia, and Volhynia. Until the last days, at any cost, they sought to “solve the problem of Ukrainianism” and get rid of the “Jewish question,” because in the policy of the rehabilitation camp, both of these topics rhymed.

It is worth recalling that 125,000 soldiers of Ukrainian nationality fought in Polish uniforms in the September campaign, of which 8–9,000 gave their lives for Poland.

Neither Ukrainian nor Jewish. Industry and trade must be Polish.

The death of Marshal Józef Piłsudski on 12 May 1935 coincided with the end of the economic recession, the balancing of the budget and the receipt of an arms loan from France (1936). Under the leadership of the new Marshal, Edward Rydz-Śmigły, a bold plan was developed to develop the defense industry and modernize the army.

At the turn of February and March 1936, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Treasury Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski presented a four-year plan for the economic development of the state. It consisted, in particular, of concentrating arms production in the Vistula and San rivers, with a reliance on the Bug. The Central Industrial District (CID) included 35 counties from the Lviv and Lublin voivodeships, together with the Kholm region.

Ambitious military plans were accompanied by the intention of profound social transformations, set out in a program of “totalization” of public life. The government-run Gazeta Polska wrote that totalization is: concentration of state power; planned economy; monolithic organization of the nation [of exclusively ethnic Poles]. Sounds familiar.

The Sanitation authorities sought to eliminate not only Ukrainians. The directives of the district command headquarters in Lublin frankly stated: “It should be remembered that anti-Semitism, which manifests itself in the economic boycott and the removal of Jews from commercial and industrial establishments, can bring positive results to the state only when the places vacated by them are occupied by Poles capable of running them. The vacating of Jewish establishments should be considered harmful to other minorities.” Thus, the Pilsudchyky ended up as executors of the program of the far right.

The newspaper Tygodnik Społeczno-Gospodarczy published a programmatic article entitled “The Central Industrial District Must Be Polish” on January 29, 1936. It stated: “A NEW, SPECIAL TYPE OF PERSON is being formed in the Central Industrial District – the implementer of the Central Industrial District. This phenomenon was emphasized in his speech in the Sejm by Deputy Prime Minister Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski.”

From this it is concluded that “only a Pole can work in the Central Vocational Training Center – and not a Pole in the formal sense, but someone who belongs to the Polish people, who alone provides a full guarantee of proper care for its development.”

Two solutions were envisaged:

1. “a legislative ban on the settlement of non-Polish elements on the territory of the Central Polish Autonomous Community”,
2. “a legislative order to resettle the non-Polish element from the territory of the Central Polish People’s Republic [Ukrainians and Jews] to other areas of Poland, if its complete emigration from the country cannot yet be accomplished.”

The Sanation authorities had in mind primarily the Jews, because they were the ones who dominated in crafts, trade, and urban property and did not fit into the concept of a “new type of person – the Polish pioneer.” But, despite the efforts of Foreign Minister Józef Bek, Poland was

unable to acquire overseas colonies to massively resettle the Jewish population there, so it resorted to the idea of “internal deportations.”

A daring attack by the gentry of the countryside with the nationalist Bolesław Piasecki

The aforementioned zagrodowa gentry was to become an outpost of Polishness in Galicia and Volhynia, so in February 1938, at a congress under the auspices of the army and the Catholic clergy in Przemyśl, the Union of Zagorodova Gentry was established. Dean Fr. Antoni Miodynski became the chairman, Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigli took honorary patronage, and the work of the Union was led by General Janusz Gluchowski, Deputy Minister of Military Affairs. In early 1939, structures were also created in Volhynia and Polissya.

In the great-power-colonial blindness, the idea of Polonizing the Rus’ lands was born by demonstrating to the Rus’ rascals their superiority. We, the Poles, are the nobility, we are the lords, we are Latin Catholics, we bring you Western civilization.

Who was supposed to do this?

The history of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth shyly mentions the cooperation of the United Camp of Sanitation with the chauvinistic and totalitarian National Radical Movement “Falanga”. Formally, this was supposed to be only an episode, and the cooperation supposedly ended in January 1938, when Colonel Adam Koc was removed from the leadership of the organization.

However, as Professor Szymon Rudnicki writes in the monograph “Falanga. Ruch Narodowo-Radykalny” , at the end of 1938 the authorities turned to Bolesław Piasecki, the leader of the “Falanga”, to delegate his people to the leadership of the Union of Rural Gentry.

The proposal was accepted. The Falangists entered the governing bodies of the Union and edited its magazine “Pobudka”. Piasecki proclaimed: “Greater Poland in our vision is a People and a State with such a powerful organized will that it will not only be able to liberate the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from over four million Jews, not only stop the Ukrainization of the four and a half million inhabitants of Kresje, but above all make Poland capable of fulfilling its historical mission.”

Olgierd Szpakowski wrote in the columns of the weekly “Falanga” that “the war is going on” in Lesser Poland, and “Polishness must go from defense to offense.” So far, he said, about 200 thousand souls have been “vindicated,” and the goal is to reclaim another 700 thousand. He saw the solution in “Polish revolutionary nationalism,” whose task is to change the slogan “Poles for the Sien” to the policy “Ukrainians – for the Buh, for the Sluch, over the Dnieper. ”

Szpakowski was right: the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, on the eve of the war with Germany and Soviet Russia, was waging war against its own citizens – Ukrainians.

The mindset of the then military is well reflected in the statement of General Gustaw Paszkiewicz, a Polonizer, commander of the 12th Infantry Division stationed in Ternopil: “The territory, natural resources and the border with friendly Romania make Eastern Lesser Poland one of the key elements of Poland’s power. Today, the importance of these lands as the foreland

of the Central Industrial District is growing many times over. If we take into account that they lead us the shortest route to the Black Sea and the Balkans, then we cannot deny them one of the leading roles in the integral issue of state power.”

Andrzej Duda – a worthy successor to General Paszkiewicz – also dreamed of Intermarium under the Polish flag, spear and hussar wing. Of course, one can blame anti-historicism, but one still wants to shout: “Doctor! Doctor!”

Subcarpathian Rus. “These Sichkovs Should Be Shot”

Little known in Poland is the episode of the emergence of Transcarpathian Rus’ in 1938, an ephemeral autonomous state. It did not exist for long: between the Munich Agreement (September 30, 1938, as a result of which Germany seized the Sudetenland, Hungary – southern Slovakia, and Poland – Zaolzie) and the complete annexation of Czechoslovakia by Hitler on March 15, 1939. Then Hungary completely occupied Transcarpathian Ukraine.

The Sanitation authorities panicked. They realized that Hitler’s next target could be Poland. The fear passed after the signing of a military alliance with Great Britain on March 31 and receiving guarantees from it of the independence of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Kwiatkowski’s planners returned to work. Now the 15-year plan provided for large investments aimed at the “polonization of cities” – that is, in the language of anti-Semites, “Jewishization”. The Ukrainian problem was planned to be solved much earlier.

However, an urgent current problem arose. Ukrainians – Polish citizens – were returning to Poland from Transcarpathian Rus’, which was occupied by the Hungarians. They were mostly members of paramilitary formations, the so-called Sich, who had previously voluntarily gone to Transcarpathian Rus’ to support the new state. Now they had to flee. They wanted to get home, to the territory of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

General Wacław Stachiewicz, Chief of the General Staff of the Polish Army, informed the commanders of Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły’s order to shoot members of the Transcarpathian Sich who would try to cross into Poland: “These Sich members,” he reported, “must be shot. And if they surrender, immediately disarm and internecine. Another thing is that Mr. Marshal would not want them to get into our territory at all, even if they had to be interned. But Mr. Marshal’s fundamental goal is for us not to burden ourselves with all sorts of noise that might try to reach us from there.”

The latest historical research has confirmed that the Polish Army carried out the marshal’s order with great success. On three Carpathian passes, citizens of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from the defeated divisions of the Carpathian Sich who were trying to return home were shot. Ukrainian historian Oleksandr Pahirya established that during one execution on the Veretsky (Tukholsky) Pass, more than 40 Sich soldiers died. He estimated that more than 120 people were killed on the three passes.

This was a crime – regardless of the fact that later some of the Sichkovites who remained in Hungary formed the Ukrainian Legion, which operated under the auspices of the Abwehr, took

part in the September campaign on the side of the Germans, and in 1941 the infamous Nachtigall and Roland battalions were formed on its basis.

The “liquidation” of the OUN and Ukrainian nationalism also began: by mid-September, 4–5 thousand people were imprisoned in prisons and in the camp in Bereza Kartuska.

One of the greatest mysteries of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was the complete disregard for the threat posed by the USSR and the possibility of its alliance with the Third Reich – even after August 23, when Moscow and Berlin agreed to divide Poland. During the analysis of the causes of the September defeat, military intelligence blamed the Foreign Ministry headed by Beck for this, while diplomats shifted the blame to the employees of the Second Department of the General Staff – that is, intelligence and counterintelligence.

Undoubtedly, the capabilities of Polish intelligence were seriously limited by the defeat of spy networks at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s and the extermination of the Polish population during the so-called “Polish NKVD operation” of 1937–1938. Even worse – again a painful analogy – was that Soviet agents operated in the highest echelons of the Second Polish Republic. Tadeusz Kobylianski, Beck’s closest associate and head of the Eastern and Political Departments of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, worked for the USSR. In such a situation, the possibilities for Soviet disinformation and influence on Polish politics were enormous.

And finally, in August 1938, Stalin dissolved the Communist Party of Poland, as well as the Communist Party of Western Ukraine and the Communist Party of Western Belarus. The decision was unprecedented, as Stalin had never dissolved any other communist party. In the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, this was seen as another manifestation of the weakness of the USSR. Władysław Gomułka, his biographer Andrzej Werblan, and the then member of the CPSU, Oziasz Szczęchter, held a different opinion, believing that this was preparation for a Soviet-German alliance. By dissolving the CPSU, Stalin was sending a signal that a return to the “Rapallo Line” was possible, that is, an alliance between Moscow and Berlin with désintéressement (disinterest) in the fate of Poland and the Poles was possible. Polish intelligence and think tanks did not understand this.

From the point of view of Stalin’s interests, the anti-Ukrainian and anti-Jewish actions of the Rydz-Śmigły team were an ideal scenario. The USSR could present its participation in the Second Partition of the Polish Commonwealth as “aid to our Ukrainian and Belarusian brothers oppressed by the Polish gentry.” This was the main line of Soviet propaganda after September 17.

President Nawrocki’s dangerous game

Ukraine is in a fierce full-scale war with Russia. Russia has long been waging a hybrid war against us: sabotage, arson, cyberattacks, GPS signal jamming, mass disinformation, black propaganda, migration attacks on the eastern border, provocations, fear-mongering, airspace violations, traditional espionage, and most recently, drone attacks.

The conclusions from this story are self-evident.

Every time Poland cooperated with Ukraine, we won and Russia lost. And every time the gene of superiority, the gene of dominance, won in us, Ukraine lost, Poland lost, and Russia won. It couldn’t be said any easier – and it’s impossible not to understand it.

Karol Nawrocki has just submitted to the Sejm a draft law banning the propaganda of “Banderism”. There are so many other truly necessary laws – but, according to Nawrocki, Poles cannot do without this one right now. As if drawing out the most painful and most conflicting maps of history is the highest national priority. Of course, it is – but for Moscow.Nawrocki launched a “diplomatic offensive”, but did not go to Kyiv. And he will not go soon, judging by his consistently hostile policy towards Ukraine. Let us recall that in July the Ukrainians signaled: Polish and Lithuanian SIM cards were installed in Russian drones that were shot down over the territory of Ukraine. This indicated that they were supposed to fly to Poland and Lithuania.

Meanwhile, experts from the European analytical group Res Futura warned that in September the Russians would strike Poland with a powerful disinformation attack. And indeed, the Russian drone raid on September 9 and 10 was accompanied by an extremely powerful attack on the Internet. This was stated by Deputy Prime Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski.

The goal is to hammer into the Poles’ heads that the drones were Ukrainian, that “Ukraine is dragging us into the war,” that “NATO can’t do anything,” and that Belarus and Russia are generally “friendly states.”

Replacing Donald Tusk with Karol Nawrocki during the online conversation of European leaders with Donald Trump after his meeting with Putin in Alaska was an action to the detriment of the state, because there were no Polish representatives in Washington on August 18–20, when key talks for Ukraine, Europe, and NATO were taking place there.

If Poland’s absence in Washington can still be considered a coincidence, then Navrotsky’s openly anti-Ukrainian, and therefore pro-Russian, actions cannot.

The veto of the law on aid to Ukraine fueled anti-Ukrainian sentiment, creating the perfect backdrop for Putin’s actions against Poland. The presidential palace has not drawn any conclusions from this and intends to continue this fatal course.

There was already one uncompromising president

Professor Stanisław Pigoń from the Jagiellonian University, associated with the Ludovician movement, was among the professors who went to see President Ignacy Mościcki in 1939. They explained to him that the situation was extraordinary, war was almost inevitable. A government of national unity was needed, understanding with the opposition, and gestures towards the emigrants – Vytos and Korfante.

Mościcki rejected any compromise. Then, faced with the threat of war with Hitler, he declared that “the camp of Józef Piłsudski will not renounce responsibility for Poland.”

How far-sighted and foresighted Ignacy Mościcki was, not to renounce his Swiss citizenship. A few months later, he left the country and settled in neutral Switzerland.

It is 1938 in Poland now. But September ’39 must not be repeated. There is no fatalism in history – there is only the history of stupidity in Poland. Let us not add another chapter to it.