Page 56 - bne IntelliNews monthly magazine October 2024

56 I Eastern Europe bne October 2024
the war, and Sybiha will now be tasked with building on that momentum as the military situation worsens.
One of his immediate responsibilities will be to navigate the complex diplomatic landscape surrounding Ukraine’s peace efforts. Zelenskiy has called for a second peace summit in November to which China and Russia will be invited following the failure
of the Swiss peace summit held on
June 16-17 that was supposed to renew Ukraine’s international support and further isolate Russia. However, only
76 countries signed off on the final watered down communiqué – half the number that voted to condemn Russia in the UN voting at the start of the war, highlighting the inroads Russia has made in undermining Ukraine’s support amongst the Global South.
In his previous role, Sybiha helped organise Ukraine’s Swiss peace summit, travelling to China in June 2024 to meet senior officials, including Sun Weidong and Li Hui, in an attempt to secure Beijing’s participation, which failed. Beijing said that as long as Russia didn’t
attend the event China saw no point
in attending. Nevertheless, Sybiha’s experience in high-stakes diplomacy will be critical as Ukraine continues to seek international backing for its territorial integrity and post-war reconstruction.
Relations with Poland, a strong
backer of Ukraine’s effort to restore its territorial integrity, have been marred by a polemical trade row, after cheap Ukrainian grain wrecked the Polish grain market in April 2023, causing Warsaw to unilaterally ban the transit of grain to the EU – one of Ukraine’s biggest foreign exchange earners. That ban remains in place and other disputes over Ukrainian truckers transiting
the country have appeared in the meantime.
Sybiha took a combative stance towards Poland over its grain exports ban, where he accused Warsaw of pushing Ukraine towards “euthanasia” by prolonging
an embargo on Ukrainian agricultural products.
Poland will continue military assistance to Ukraine for “as long as it takes,” in
line with a comprehensive bilateral security deal Zelenskiy announced following a meeting with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk in July. However, Tusk qualified the relationship saying that Poland would block Ukraine’s membership of the EU unless it “owned up to past atrocities.” The two countries have a long and troubled history, especially during WWII when Ukrainian nationalists partnered with the Nazis, which led to a massacre of 60,000 ethnic Poles living in western Ukraine that had been part of Poland in the
past, amongst other things. Warsaw has long said that Ukraine should formally apologise for what it calls a genocide.
As Ukraine’s new top diplomat, Sybiha will also likely focus on expanding Kyiv’s ties beyond its traditional partners. Kuleba has recently toured SE Asia and Africa
in an effort to drum up more support
for his country in the Global South, particularly in the wake of the recent Swiss peace summit. The stakes are high as Ukraine continues to face Russia’s aggression while striving for international recognition of its sovereignty over Crimea and the Donbas regions.
Tusk says Ukraine won’t join EU without
owning up to past atrocities
Wojciech Kosc in Poland
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has said that Ukraine will not get Poland's consent to join the European Union unless it meets Warsaw's expectations on how it should deal with Ukrainian nationalists' World War 2-era atrocities against Poles.
Poland has been one of Kyiv's most dedicated allies since Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022. Polish authorities have sent huge volumes of military equipment and welcomed hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Warsaw has long said that it is in Poland's best interest for Ukraine to stop Russia
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so that Poles do not need to fight the Russian army themselves on their home soil one day.
But Ukraine's sacrifice of blood for the sake of Poland's security is not going to set the two neighbours' complicated historical record straight once and for all despite Ukrainian officials hinting at exactly that.
It's not simply "history"
While on a visit to Poland, Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said that history belongs to history now that Ukraine is struggling against Russian aggression.
"If we were to start digging into history today, the quality of the conversation would be entirely different, and we could go very deep into the past, bringing up the wrongs that Poles did to Ukrainians and Ukrainians did to Poles," Kuleba said.
The Ukrainian minister also said that the "focus should be on building the future together and leaving history to
the historians".
The statement rubbed Poland up very much the wrong way.
"My assessment of what the Ukrainian minister said is clearly negative," Tusk