KYIV — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced Saturday that he has sent back a high-level state honor to Poland’s president, just one day after the award was officially revoked amid a dispute rooted in World War Two history.
Polish President Karol Nawrocki made the decision Friday to take back the medal he had presented to Zelenskiy in 2023. The move came after Zelenskiy renamed a Ukrainian military unit in honor of WWII-era Ukrainian insurgents who have been accused of carrying out massacres of Polish civilians.
Writing on the social media platform X, Zelenskiy explained his reasoning for returning the decoration. “We believed that the Order of the White Eagle, awarded in 2023, was meant for the Ukrainian People and our army. That is what was said at the time,” he wrote. “Today, I sent the Order back to the President of Poland.”
Zelenskiy also shared a photograph showing the medal being placed in a box and dispatched to the Polish president’s office.
Despite the tension, Zelenskiy expressed appreciation for Poland’s ongoing backing of Ukraine and said his country would “remain open to all meaningful formats of engagement with Poland in order to try to avoid conflicting interpretations of the difficult and painful chapters of our shared past.”
The fallout extended beyond Zelenskiy himself. His chief of staff, Kyrylo Budanov, announced he was giving back his own Polish honor — the Golden Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, which he had received last year. Budanov described Nawrocki’s original decision to revoke Zelenskiy’s award as “a gift” for Russia.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha had already weighed in before Zelenskiy’s announcement, calling Nawrocki’s move “a strategic error” and asserting that no foreign head of state “is going to dictate our history to us.”
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who is a political opponent of Nawrocki, called on both leaders to keep their composure and avoid escalating the situation further.
When Nawrocki announced the revocation, he was careful to note the action was “not directed against the Ukrainian people” and that it did “not signify a change in the strategic direction of Polish security policy.”
Poland has been one of Ukraine’s strongest backers throughout the more than four-year conflict with Russia. However, public opinion in Poland toward Ukraine has grown increasingly complicated in recent years, shaped by frustration over the large influx of Ukrainian refugees, disagreements about grain imports, and lingering wounds from the wartime massacres.
The controversy involves the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, known by its Ukrainian acronym UPA. While many Ukrainians view the UPA as patriotic fighters who resisted both Soviet and Nazi forces — and as a symbol of Ukraine’s drive for independence from Moscow — the group is also linked to the Volhynia massacres. Those killings, which took place between 1943 and 1945, resulted in the deaths of approximately 100,000 Polish civilians at the hands of Ukrainian nationalists, according to Poland. Thousands of Ukrainians also lost their lives in retaliatory violence during that same period.
The dispute over how to interpret the UPA’s legacy now threatens to deepen a diplomatic rift between two nations that have otherwise been close strategic partners during Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine.
