NEIGHBORS: THE HIDDEN HURT BEHIND THE POLAND-UKRAINE GRAIN AND ARMS DISPUTE
“The name of reconciliation is remembrance.”
--Hassidic proverb
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As evening draws nigh on this shortened autumn day so does Yom Kippur, the Hebrew Day of Atonement.? This fact must be uppermost in the mind of the great statesman of our time, Volodymir Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine, a Jew.?
The war of savage aggression unleashed by the Russian Federation upon a sovereign nation, its Slavic neighbor, Ukraine, on 22 February 2022, has strengthened Ukraine’s ties with its other neighbors.? These neighbors are both Slavic and non-Slavic.? It has been with their help that ?Ukrainian mothers, grandmothers and children have been able flee to places of greater safety outside the country while Ukrainian men and very many Ukrainian women have stayed to fight, too many of them to die.? ?Among those neighbors, no country has risked more and given more than Poland.? Seemingly without hesitation an already open frontier was flung wide open for the Ukrainians as Poland stepped up once more to be both a bulwark and an arsenal of democracy against Russian aggression.? In proportion to its geographic size and proximity to the war, to its population and resources, no other country on earth has given as much and risked as much for the defense of Ukraine as the Republic of Poland, the third democratic republic in that nation’s history.? Poland and Poles have stood by Ukraine and the Ukrainians, seemingly not counting the cost.
Why, then, was the world astonished this past week to hear that Poland was counting the cost, taking stock of its depleted stores of advanced armaments, and that it announced the possibility of no longer supplying Ukraine with these, at least until Poland’s own defenses were made secure.? This was without curtailing Polish transfer points for supplies from the US and elsewhere, or training and logistical support.? But why now, just as the Armed Forces of Ukraine are trying to drive the Russian invaders and occupiers out of its territory as far as possible before winter and another year of war?
The sticking point has nothing to do with the war directly, or with Polish resolve and good will toward Ukrainians, but with another basic issue of survival for Ukraine, for Poland and for other nations in the immediate region such as Slovakia.? That is to say, the question at issue is food and the agricultural industry that produces it, the question of bread, of grain, of life.?
The Russian blockade of Ukraine’s normal grain shipping access through the Black Sea is at the root of this problem which is to say, the problem was deliberately caused by Russia with the thought that the Ukrainian grain the invader-occupiers were not able to burn or poison could simply be made to rot in the fields while the world depending on it, especially in Africa, simply starves or pays higher prices for Russian grain.? A Ukrainian direct hit on the Russian Black Sea fleet HQ at Sebastopol in Crimea this week may help to solve that problem.[1]? No Russian Black Sea Fleet to obstruct Ukrainian shipping and all will be well, except for the odd Russian drone attack, which could be prevented with more timely delivery of advanced NATO antiaircraft systems to Ukraine.
The Polish fear was that, with nowhere else to go but north to the Baltic, Ukrainian grain might nearly destroy the market for Polish grain.[2]? This fear is shared by other regional grain producers, such as little Slovakia, which is working on a market solution with Ukraine potentially providing a model for a Polish-Ukrainian grain deal.? Ukraine is understandably fearful of any disruption of badly needed arms and ammunition from Poland, and Poland is understandably more than irritated that its agricultural sector could be wrecked, albeit unintentionally, by a glut of Ukrainian grain.[3]
But why was the Polish announcement by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki so abrupt?? Why was some Polish pain apparently so acute? ?Real concern about Poland’s military readiness in case the Russians to break through Ukrainian lines and head west for their perennial enemy, attacking from both Ukraine and Belarus, is more than reasonable.? And all of the already agreed on armaments and equipment from Poland will continue to be delivered to Ukraine.? No, there is something else here, something with which perhaps no one but the President of Ukraine can deal.? That something is called in Polish and remembered in Poland as Wo?yn.[4]?
Ukrainian Volhynia and the wider region of former Eastern Poland called ‘Kresy’ (the borderlands) were occupied by the Soviet Union in coordination with their allies the Nazi Germans according to a secret ‘non-aggression’ pact, so-called, accompanied also by memorandum of understanding between the Gestapo/SS and the Soviet NKVD to ‘limit the extent of Jewish influence’ in Europe, ‘limitation’ having no limits in that case.? This document was formulated at a series of conferences in 1939-40.[5]? Already in 1937, NKVD Order No. 00485 for what might be called the ‘final solution to the Polish problem in the Soviet Union’ was issued and was carried out with reports on the number of Soviet Poles executed to be submitted to Moscow every five days.[6]? This was happening all the way up to the Soviet-German joint invasion of Poland in September 1939 at which time NKVD Order No. 00485 was simply implemented by various means, including, as the Nazis were doing against the Jews in the rest of Poland, by incitement of the local population to ethnic murder.? Now part of the Soviet Union until the German counter-invasion of 1941,? Wo?yn was a killing field for a two year period of over 100,000 Polish citizens, some by NKVD execution squads but mostly by their Ukrainian neighbors.? These were peasants inspired and in many cases led by the infamous Stepan Bandera, whose Cossack cavalry squadrons were feared by Russians and Germans as well as Jews, Poles, Ukrainians who married Poles or tried to defend them, and who therefore despised Bandera.? He and his Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) targeted really anyone who did not conform to their idea of the ‘great Cossack brotherhood’ of a new and ‘great’ Ukraine, thus driving the legitimate aspirations of the Ukrainian people into the slime.? Bandera apparently had not read his Gogol (Ukrainian version) closely enough to note that his great hero, Taras Bulba, had, upon defeating the Polish city of Dubno, lifted the siege and fed and nursed the Polish inhabitants.? President Zelinskyy is fully aware of the Bandera problem and that it is not just a matter of political optics.? Zelinskyy has no reservations about replacing or firing government officials who do not represent the country they serve, as a now very former Ukrainian ambassador to Berlin found out when he decided to give a sympathetic view of Bandera on live television.?
In July of 2016 the Polish Sejm declared the massacres of Wo?yn a genocide and petitioned the UN to recognize it as such.? This was met with ‘disappointment’ by the Kyiv oligarchy of the time.? The excuses for not joining with Poland in this initiative were the fact that (a) a Ukrainian state did not exist at the time, (b) that the only existing state authority during the height of the massacres was that of the Soviet Union, or that (c) it was the Banderists (the OUN) who perpetrated the atrocities.? Only one other hypothetical cause was not mentioned at that time, namely that (d) Eskimos were actually responsible.? There is certainly guilt enough to go around, and one may hope that a future UN declaration of the Wo?yn Genocide will include the heir to the Soviet Union, and the successor of the NKVD.? That will be of course when squadrons of pigs are sighted flying over Manhattan’s East River.? But Poland and Ukraine cannot wait for that to happen, and they do not have to.?
We live in a time of many false leaders promising to make this or that country ‘great again,’ of the horror and barbarism of war, and of callous contempt we can read on this very platform for all the stateless millions who seek refuge and an ordinary life with those Four Freedoms FDR believed in, freedoms with which the Statue of Liberty welcomes New Americans.? We also do live in a time when not only leaders but whole nations can show their true greatness.? This the world has seen in both Poland and Ukraine, nations who have set aside past bitterness in order to defend life in the present and to work together to build a future with a human face. I believe that Ukraine and the Ukrainians, who each day show unparalleled courage, nobility and humanity, will someday soon speak out with one voice on this horrible chapter, and that they will close it together.? The joint observance of the 80th anniversary of the Massacre and the separate Polish and Ukrainian declarations of both heads of state is perhaps the last step toward that reconciliation whose name is remembrance.
Volhynia exists today as a civil administrative district in Russian-occupied Ukraine. May the invaders and occupiers and those who helped them leave, and may peace and a normal life return its people.? Wo?yn is a place which no longer exists as a community because the majority of the people who lived there no longer exist, a place where Poles and Jews and Ukrainians who risked their lives for both all died horrible deaths or simply descended into madness, a place where people were simply erased, ethnically cleansed, murdered in deliberate cold blood by their friends and neighbors. ?If Wo?yn still means nothing to you, if even now you do not have a visceral reaction the word, then watch the Polish docudrama of the same name. But beware, for what you will see cannot be unseen.[7]?
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--?Guy Christopher Carter, Yom Kippur, 24ix2023
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[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/22/ukraine-mounts-missile-strike-on-russian-black-sea-fleet-hq-in-crimea | https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-official-says-ukraine-struck-black-sea-navy-hq-with-missile-2023-09-22/ | https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-crimea-9c287d5bad840beedbd68eb32c4c76a3 | https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/23/europe/special-ops-black-sea-strike-dozens-dead-intl-hnk/index.html
[2] The Polish grain market has a history going back tot he very early modern period and was and ?is intricate enough for the dean of English historians of Poland, Norman Davies, to devote an entire chapter the first volume of his magisterial God’s Playground, A History of Poland, Vol. 1: From the Beginnings to 1795 (New York: Columbia University, 1982), Ch. 8, “Handel.? The Polish Grain Trade,” pp. 256ff.
[3] https://apnews.com/article/poland-ukraine-weapons-russia-war-trade-dispute-5e2e7a194b5238b86c160f0f4848b4f3 |https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/slowakei-und-ukraine-einigen-sich-in-zwist-um-importverbot-fuer-ukrainisches-getreide-100.html |https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/polen-irritiert-mit-aeusserungen-zu-waffenlieferungen-100.html
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4https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacres_of_Poles_in_Volhynia_and_Eastern_Galicia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wo%C5%82y%C5%84_Voivodeship_(1921%E2%80%931939) |
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66150790 | https://www.rferl.org/a/poland-parliament-declares-volyn-massacres-/27874252.html. See also Norman Davies, God’s Playground.? A History of Poland, Vol. 2: 1795- present (New York: Columbia University, 1982), Chapter 20, ‘Golgota,’ as well as entries for Volhynia/Wo?yn, pp. 82, 210, 280, 285, 407, 467, 473, 561.
Chief Executive Officer at Mc&Ls Group
1 年Slovakia Hungary Ukraine and Poland should check their reason to figur? out the way to speak out about their problems to be solved. We all know these countries deserve compensantion to be given for things a way forgoten..if things and relations improoved we could build something much more biger than Just an Union......