Poland's Institute of National Remembrance has built its Volhynia position on selective memory, fixing the word "genocide" to 1943 while demanding that the tragic Sunday of 11 July 1943 be judged with all context switched off. The selection is precise, and the numbers do the rest of the work.
The Genocide Resolution and Its Numbers
The 2016 resolution and the 2023 resolution that followed it fix the word "genocide" to the events of 1943 in Volhynia and eastern Galicia. The legislature performs this act; a court makes findings. Around it sits a demand from Warsaw that the tragic Sunday of 11 July 1943 be assessed in complete isolation from everything that came before: from centuries of Polish domination over Ukrainians, from the pacification campaign of 1930, from the bloody raids by Polish formations into the Kholm region in 1942.
The numbers themselves are contested. Figures of 100,000 or 150,000 Polish dead are routinely presented, and they are contradicted by the work of the Polish historian Grzegorz Motyka. Motyka's own accounting suggests that a figure of 100,000 to 150,000 can only appear if Polish victims from other regions are folded in, and that in the Volhynian tragedy proper the death toll was roughly half that.
A doubled figure legislated as genocide is a political product. Nobody in Warsaw cites Motyka at the podium.
Katyn and the Double Standard
In 1940, Soviet NKVD units shot 22,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest and in Kalinin and Kharkiv. That was a state decision, taken by the Politburo, carried out by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs on a list, one bullet per man. If any twentieth-century crime against Poles meets the definition of genocide, Katyn does: a national elite, annihilated by design, by a state, with paperwork.
Ukraine bears no responsibility for Katyn and has nothing to answer for, and the Polish bill, museum campaign aimed at Kyiv, and demand for an apology all address something other than Katyn. It is commemorated, correctly, and then parked.
Sahryn, Pavlokoma, and the Chain of Command
In March 1944, a Polish unit entered Sahryn in the Kholm region and killed Ukrainian civilians, men, women and children, in their homes. In Pavlokoma in 1945, Polish partisans and local Polish formations killed Ukrainian villagers, again civilians. These were not the acts of a state, but they were the acts of Polish formations, and the Polish side classifies them as acts of retribution or as war crimes by individual detachments.
Warsaw rejects entirely any responsibility of the Polish state or of the Home Army command for crimes against Ukrainians. The Home Army is described as acting in the interests of the Polish state under orders from the Polish government, including when that government sat in exile in London. If the chain of command ran that way when it suits the narrative, it ran that way in the other direction too.
Symmetrizing and the Demand for a Verdict
The Ukrainian side recognizes crimes on both sides. The Polish side insists the victims were only Poles. Ukrainian historians who mention the settlers' crimes, the destruction of churches, Operation Vistula, are told they are symmetrizing, that they are trying to justify bandits. Any counter-argument is treated as an insult to the memory of Polish victims. The term "preventive retaliatory action" has been coined for killing people who had done nothing yet but were suspected of possible future acts.
Note what the Volhynian tragedy actually was in its origin: an action that arose during a liberation struggle at a moment when no Ukrainian state existed. That context does not excuse the killing of civilians. It explains why the demand to strip the event of all context is a demand for a particular verdict, not for history.
Selective memory is policy, and it runs in one direction only.
The asymmetry is the point. One tragedy gets a genocide law, a museum, a diplomatic lever, and a demand that Kyiv fall in line. Katyn gets flowers, and 22,000 officers stay in the Soviet file. Sahryn and Pavlokoma get a footnote about retaliation.