The Lviv Regional Council appealed to the Verkhovna Rada and the government due to the Polish draft laws on the UPA and OUN (b)

Today, the deputies of the Lviv Regional Council appealed to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine and the government regarding the initiative of Polish politicians of the “Law and Justice” party, who submitted a draft law to the Polish Sejm, which proposes to equate the ideology of the OUN, the Bandera faction (OUN-b) and the UPA with fascism and communism. and provides criminal liability “for propaganda” of this ideology.

Lviv elected officials believe that “Polish politicians resort to manipulations and refer to one-sided and fabricated facts that do not reflect the true picture of events in Volyn and Western Ukraine during the Second World War. They impose their own historical and ideological paradigm, which is designed to discredit the right of Ukrainians to their own state.”

The appeal states that “for every conscientious Ukrainian, the UPA is the only organized armed force that, in the absence of the Ukrainian state, stood up to protect Ukrainians against the violence and terror of the German, Soviet, and Polish occupation regimes. Ukrainians do not need foreign territories, but no one can encroach on our sacred right to have our own history, to preserve national memory, to defend our own dignity.”

Deputies of the Lviv Regional Council believe that “Ukraine and Poland need to take into account the lessons of the past, build modern relations on the basis of mutual respect and equality. We believe that Ukraine and Poland should be truly strategic partners.”

The Lviv Regional Council calls on Polish politicians and the authorities to remember that the common enemy is imperial Russia and appeals to Ukrainian parliamentarians to make a decision in which to “call on the Polish side to build relations on the principles of equality, reconciliation and understanding, and not on distortion and silence of historical facts; to call on the Polish Sejm to abandon the imposition of Polish ideological and worldview constructions on the national history and milestones of statehood on Ukrainians.”

Lviv deputies also ask the Cabinet of Ministers to consider the issue of funding from the state budget programs of historical and expert research on Ukrainian-Polish relations and the preservation of Ukrainian national memory; funding from state and local budgets for research related to Polish-Ukrainian history; carrying out an appropriate information policy regarding the coverage in other countries of the true history of the Ukrainian national liberation struggle in the 20th century.

The majority of deputies voted for the appeal.