Finian Cunningham
Ordinary EU citizens should tell Britain to shove its absurd arrogance.
So, how's that for British arrogance ? Britain quit the European Union 10 years ago, but the London government is backing Ukraine's accession to the bloc.
This is while polls show that the majority of Polish citizens are opposed to Ukraine joining the EU. But, hey, non-member Britain knows better than EU citizens, right?
In an interview with Euronews, Britain's deputy prime minister, David Lammy, vowed that London would continue supporting Ukraine militarily and its bid to join the EU. He said there would be no change in policy under Andy Burnham, who is expected to take over from Keir Starmer in Downing Street in the coming weeks.
"There's absolutely no question of a change in our foreign policy," Lammy said. We have remained committed to Ukraine through successive governments, and that will continue," he added. "And we have been absolutely clear: reconnecting with the global community, a European reset, all of that continues."
That's hardly a surprise since Britain has been one of the most hawkish backers of Ukraine in the NATO proxy war against Russia. But note how London's support for Ukraine is tied to achieving a "European reset" for Britain.
It was Lammy's comments to Euronews that London endorsed Ukraine's application for EU membership that should have raised eyebrows. Surely, the question is: what business is it of non-member Britain to hold forth on EU internal affairs?
Why is Britain assuming such a prominent role in EU policymaking ? And why are European so-called leaders permitting this imposter role ? In whose interests?
The issue has been sharpened by the blazing row between Poland and Ukraine over the latter's recent commemoration of Nazi collaborators.
Warsaw is warning that it will block Ukraine's membership of the European Union after accusing the government in Kiev led by Vladimir Zelensky of glorifying Ukrainian military figures who were involved in the genocide of Poles during World War Two.
Zelensky and other state officials paid tributes to Andriy Melnyk in a reburial ceremony at the end of May. Melnyk was the leader of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which collaborated with the Nazi Wehrmacht and SS in carrying out massacres of Poles, Jews, and Slavs. Up to 100,000 Poles were murdered in Volhynia, Eastern Galicia, in what is now western Ukraine during 1943-44. Poland has declared the killings to be genocide.
Adding insult to injury, the Kiev regime last month named a commando unit of the Ukrainian Armed Forces after the "heroes of the UPA".
Polish President Karol Nawrocki condemned Ukraine for violating the "threshold of tolerance" and stripped Zelensky of Poland's highest state honor - the Order of the White Eagle, which had been awarded to him in 2023. Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials provoked further fury by returning their awards with a show of contempt.
The spat has escalated into a full-blown diplomatic crisis. Zelensky boycotted a major EU-sponsored conference in Gdańsk, Poland, last week on Ukraine's postwar reconstruction. Things must be very bad for ever-the-hustler Zelensky to skip a fundraising event.
Warsaw is not backing down. Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz reiterated that Poland will not allow Ukraine to join the EU while Kiev glorifies the memory of Nazi collaborators.
This is acutely embarrassing for the EU leadership and NATO. NATO is holding its annual conference next week in Turkey, where it is hoped that a new commitment can be found between the United States and its European allies to support Ukraine. But now Brussels is grappling with a public relations disaster as the Ukrainian regime rankles key EU and NATO member Poland with its shameless historical affiliation to Nazi Germany.
Ukrainian fascists like Stepan Bandera and Andriy Melnyk played a vile role in carrying out the Third Reich's Final Solution. Today, these fascists are venerated as "nationalist heroes".
The scandal is exposing EU and NATO propaganda which has sought to exalt Ukraine as a "defender of European democracy against Russian aggression". The Nazi collaborator row also confirms Russia's narrative that it is combating a NeoNazi regime in Kiev, installed in 2014 by a CIA coup and weaponized by NATO as a proxy against Russia.
Ukraine has been lobbying to enter the EU and NATO for years without substantive success. It was given EU candidate status in 2022, but the process has been dogged by scandals. The stench of corruption among Ukrainian politicians and businesses is a major cause of opposition among European citizens. But the EU and NATO leadership keep pushing the membership option because they are obsessed with using it as leverage over Russia.
For years, Hungary objected to Ukraine's membership, using its veto to prevent accession. With a change of government in Budapest earlier this year, the Brussels leadership thought they had overcome a major obstacle.
However, the incorrigible Kiev regime has ended up aggravating Poland to the point that Warsaw is threatening to use its veto power. The Polish obstacle is more problematic because of the deeply controversial nature of Nazi history and genocide.
The irony is rich. Zelensky claims to be Jewish and invokes that identity as a way to deny Kiev's NeoNazi conduct. Yet, the renaming of streets in Kiev, Lvov, Vinnytsia and other Ukrainian cities in honor of Nazi collaborators is beyond denial. Poland has demanded that these street names be revoked. That's not Russian propaganda. It is factual, as verified by Warsaw.
Polish governments knew full well about the NeoNazi affiliations of Kiev for years, but ignored the torchlit processions and Sieg Heil salutes, and chose instead to be one of NATO's biggest supporters of Ukraine, all because of a shared anti-Russian obsession. Now that the Frankenstein monster it has helped to create has become intolerable to Poland, Warsaw is protesting. Polish people are up in arms, and partly out of anger with their own governments for being associated in the past with the Kiev regime.
Another irony is that Britain is so desperate to ingratiate itself with the European Union's leadership for a trade reset with Brussels, after the economic disaster of Brexit, that London is lending a lobbying effort to get Ukraine into the bloc.
The Russophobes in Brussels may appreciate London's lobbying. But ordinary EU citizens should tell Britain to shove its absurd arrogance.