In mid-August 2022, Internet resources distributed a scan of a letter allegedly signed by Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba and sent to his Polish colleagues. The letter contained a request to give the name of the Ukrainian figure to the street in Warsaw on which the Russian Embassy is located. We checked how plausible this information is.

This is the publication appeared on the evening of August 17, 2022 in the popular Telegram channel “War on Fake”: “Stepan Bandera Street may appear in Warsaw. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry insists on this. The letter, signed by Dmitry Kuleba, states that Ukraine, like Poland, advocates de-Sovietization and decommunization. In this regard, the Ukrainian side proposes to rename Belvederskaya Street, where the Russian Embassy is located, in Warsaw to Stepan Bandera Street.

“Such a step will be a significant gesture of support for the Polish Republic and its citizens of the Ukrainian people,” the letter says.

The Polish authorities are probably ready to agree to the Ukrainian proposal. In any case, the representative of the Institute of National Remembrance (INR) Peter Gorka published on its Facebook page, a letter from the Polish Foreign Ministry, in which the institute is invited to “glorify Bandera.”

“In September 2022, the chairman of the IPP needs to hold meetings with scientists and book authors, journalists in order to popularize among Polish citizens the image of the leader of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) as a hero of the struggle for the independence of Ukraine with Bolshevik Russia. The mayor and administration of Warsaw should consider the possibility of making a decision to rename Belvederska Street, on which the Russian Embassy is located, to Stepan Bandera Street,” the document says.”

In his publication “War on Fake”, he refers to the Telegram channel “Joker DPR”, where news appeared a day earlier (335,000 views), and her continuation about the Institute of National Remembrance - August 17 (462,000 views). Quite quickly the information was disseminated on VKontakte (publics “Reports from the New Russia militia", "Donbass Media Group Gorlovka", "Hot spots"), and then it was the turn of the media and large media resources, such as "Komsomolskaya Pravda", "Politicus", "Pravda.ru", "Glas.ru", "Public news service", "Eastern feed news" And RIA FAN. She dispersed and Polish segment of social networks. The news was commented on by the former Prime Minister of Ukraine Mykola Azarov, Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Information Technologies and Communications, deputy of the United Russia faction Oleg Matveychev And some political scientists.

This chain of reactions clearly lacked a response from at least one of the foreign policy departments of the two countries. And he followed. First, on August 17, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland Marcin Przydacz (whose signature is allegedly on the second letter) stated, that such a document never appeared in his ministry, and “linguistic errors clearly indicate the potential authors of this provocation.” And in published on August 18 tweet The official page of the Polish Foreign Ministry said: “Fake letters from the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine and Poland about renaming a street in Warsaw are circulating online. The fake information was spread on Telegram by pro-Russian hacktivists, who also distributed content about the alleged deportation of Ukrainians from Poland.”

By pro-Russian hacktivists, apparently, we mean the authors of the Joker DPR channel. And indeed, publication, which appeared on the channel on June 17, is very similar in style to the August case. In it, one could also see an “insider” scan of a letter from Dmitry Kuleba to the Polish Foreign Ministry, this time with “a request to deport from Poland all Ukrainian male refugees aged 18 to 60 years to send them to the front.” As you might guess, this news turned out to be fake.

They also responded to the message of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in their Telegram channels Verkhovna Rada And Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense Ukraine, thereby making it clear that the Ukrainian side also refuses to recognize the authenticity of its letter. As for the second document, the Facebook pages of Piotr Gurka (this is how the surname Górka is read in Russian) and Dariusz Walusiak, screenshots from which were posted on the “Joker DPR” channel, are, as of today, at least Not are in the public domain, or perhaps even deleted. Moreover, the only Peter Gurka mentioned on the official website of the Institute of National Remembrance is artist, and nothing is known about his membership in the organization, just a military-historical album of reproductions of the master is displayed in the “Bookstore” subsection of this resource.

Why did the Institute of National Remembrance get involved in this story? The fact is that this organization (the full name is “Institute of National Remembrance - Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against the Polish People”) also deals with the issue of ethnic cleansing that the Poles suffered during the Second World War. Polish Law on the Institute of National Remembrance dedicated, in particular, to the crimes of members of Ukrainian formations who collaborated with the Third Reich. The largest of these acts was Volyn massacre of 1943–1944, to which Stepan Bandera had no personal connection, but the activities of the section of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-b) led by him are perceived harshly by many residents of modern Poland negative. Therefore, issues related to Bandera and Bandera’s followers periodically become news feed in the Polish media, then causing a resonance in Russia and Ukraine.

It should be noted that, according to Polish legislation, renaming streets is the exclusive responsibility of the city council. Thus, on this issue, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would have to contact Warsaw City Council, and not to the mayor of the city mentioned in the pseudo-document. This once again proves that he is fake.

We also note that some countries, as a sign of solidarity with Ukraine, actually change the names of the streets on which Russian diplomatic missions are located. So, in Prague And Vilnius the streets on which Russian embassies are located now bear the name of Heroes of Ukraine. IN Krakow The Russian consulate is located on Free Ukraine Square. And in Bratislava the street with the Russian embassy is named after Boris Nemtsov, a Russian opposition leader killed in Moscow in 2015.