On 13-14 of September in Kyiv, Ukraine, Poland's foreign minister Radosław Sikorski suggested that in the future one option for a peaceful transition for Crimea might be United Nations supervision in an interim period.
Perhaps it was the form and timing of the remarks that irritated Ukraine - Sikorski was not a panellist, but spoke spontaneously. This was one explanation of Poland's ONET which has sought to understand the tension between the two countries' ministries.
We spoke to Nazar Oliynyk who heads the Ukrainian Section at Polish Radio to better understand a Ukrainian perspective and gauge the seriousness of the Ukrainian-Polish dispute.
Oliynyk suggested that on the one hand temperatures were running high because of other diplomatic issues in the background such as the resolution of war crimes.
Poland, especially Poland's right, has been pressing for greater recognition / reparations for the Volhynian massacre - a genocidal crime against humanity committed by ethnic Ukrainians against ethnic Poles in WWII. (More on this history here.)
Oliynyk suggested that this and other issues have led to a minor "tit-for-tat" diplomatic exchange between Poland and Ukraine.
However, he also suggested a more global-strategic issue. That is widespread Ukrainian scepticism about the effectiveness of UN peace keeping forces, if they were to be employed either in Crimea or along the Russian-Ukrainian border. Peace guarantees involving the UN need to be "more than a piece of paper", Oliynyk said.
Ukraine has reason to doubt international peace guarantees. In 1994 Ukraine gave up its nuclear weaponry under the terms of the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, which provided that Ukraine would not be attacked by the US, Russia or the UK "except in self-defence".
Sources: ONET.pl, European Network - Remembrance and Solidarity
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