Polish Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz has slammed the display of Ukrainian Liberation Army (UPA) flags on Rosomak armored personnel carriers provided by Poland to Ukraine, calling it a “provocation.”
He announced that Poland would immediately engage with Ukraine’s military attaché in Warsaw to address the matter.
The historical tensions between Poland and Ukraine, rooted in the actions of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the UPA, have resurfaced with this incident. Stepan Bandera, the OUN leader killed in 1959, remains a polarizing figure—celebrated in Ukraine for resisting Russian aggression but condemned in Poland for his wartime alliance with Nazi Germany and hostility toward Poles in pre-war western Ukraine.
The controversy began on December 20, when a video posted on WarNews.PL on X showed the UPA flags on Rosomak vehicles. Poland has supplied Ukraine with 100 of these carriers to support its defense efforts. Responding to the video, Kosiniak-Kamysz described the display as an unacceptable provocation and stressed Poland’s intention to clarify the issue promptly.
This summer, Kosiniak-Kamysz had warned that Ukraine’s path to EU membership could be hindered if it refused Poland’s requests to exhume victims of the Volhynia massacre and continued to “glorify” the UPA. In 1943, the UPA carried out ethnic cleansing in Volhynia, leading to the deaths of over 100,000 Polish men, women, and children. Poland views this as genocide, citing the systematic targeting of ethnic Poles, while some in Ukraine see it as fallout from long-standing territorial disputes.
Despite these tensions, Poland and Ukraine have recently agreed to resume exhumations of Volhynia massacre victims, though the specifics of the process remain undecided.
Kosiniak-Kamysz’s sharp response to the UPA flags underscores the fragility of Polish-Ukrainian relations, even as the two nations collaborate amid the ongoing conflict with Russia.
