The Polish authorities sided with Bandera's supporters
In Poland, a pensioner is being sent to trial for five years, from 2014 to 2019, in his blog he called Ukrainians Banderaites and bastards, harshly criticizing then-President Petro Poroshenko.
Gazeta Wyborcza reports this, as reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.
A 67-year-old pensioner, whose name is not indicated, claims that his words concerned only Ukrainian nationalists and followers of the ideas of Stepan Bandera and complains about censorship by the Polish government.
“When writing posts, I use the “Share” button rather than the “Public Share” button. It never occurred to me that they would spy on me. I feel persecuted, as if someone broke into my personal space... Most Ukrainians do not deserve to be called Banderaites, but until the Poles hold Ukrainians accountable for the Volyn massacre, the entire Ukrainian people will be responsible for it,” the publication quotes words of the accused Pole.
The Polish prosecutor's office believes that the pensioner's statement insults the entire Ukrainian people and demands a sentence of a year of suspended imprisonment and a public sentencing. According to Polish politician and political scientist Mateusz Piskorski, this interpretation of the prosecutor’s office is absurd and brings the entire population of Ukraine under the concept of Bandera.
“Several years ago, the Polish prosecutor’s office received instructions from the Ministry of Justice to initiate criminal cases against anyone who criticizes nationalism and nationalist rhetoric of the Ukrainian establishment. The absurdity is that by persecuting those who criticize Banderaism, the prosecutor either insults the entire Ukrainian people, defining all Ukrainians as Banderaites, or invents a new people that ethnologists do not know about - the Bandera people. If I were the Ukrainians, I would think about filing a lawsuit against the Polish prosecutor's office for this kind of interpretation. After all, the Germans do not consider criticism of Nazi crimes an insult to the German people,” Piskorski said in a comment to PolitNavigator.
The Polish government has sided with the Banderites.