Few Western observers took notice when Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko signed a package of laws last Friday. They should have. The laws, which were rushed through parliament without public debate, strive to provide the country with a “correct” and binding historical memory. Those holding alternative views of Ukraine’s past risk prison terms of up to ten years. Vedomosti, a liberal Russian newspaper generally sympathetic to Ukrainian reformers, lamented the passage of the laws: “The attempt…to turn history into a handmaiden of ideology is removing Ukraine from democratic values, bringing it troublingly close to contemporary Russia.”

Vedomosti understates the problem. Existing laws in Russia criminalize historical views that “relativize Nazism” and question the narrative of Soviet victory in World War II. The new laws in Ukraine go further. Their aim is to impose a sharp break between present-day Ukraine and its entire Soviet past, now deemed criminal. As they foreground a questionable story of ethnic Ukrainians who throughout their history fought Russian domination, these initiatives also whitewash dark areas of the country's past.

One of the laws condemns “the Communist and Nazi totalitarian regimes in Ukraine and bans propaganda of their symbols.” For the most part, however, the law focuses on the Soviet era. All that it has to say about Nazism is that its racial theories drove certain groups out of their professions. It makes no mention of the mass murder of Jews, let alone the participation of Ukrainians in these atrocities.

The omission is strategic: This is made clear by another law, which hails soldiers and partisans who fought in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) as national freedom fighters. During World War II, the UPA collaborated with the German Wehrmacht against the Soviet Red Army. As the Germans withdrew from Ukraine in 1943, scores of Ukrainian policemen who had served with the occupiers, killing communists and Jews, joined the ranks of the UPA. During its prolonged fight for independent statehood the insurgent army committed numerous atrocities against ethnic minorities. Roman Shukhevich, the army’s commander, was a notorious anti-Semite. The new law glorifying the UPA was drafted by Yuri Shukhevich, Roman Shukhevich’s son.

In an open letter to President Poroshenko this April, a group of scholars and Ukraine experts lamented that the law would make it “a crime to question the legitimacy of an organization (UPA) that slaughtered tens of thousands of Poles in one of the most heinous acts of ethnic cleansing in the history of Ukraine.”