Polish president strips Zelensky of top honour over WWII unit renaming
Polish President Karol Nawrocki stripped Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of Poland’s highest state honour, the Order of the White Eagle, on Friday, escalating a bitter dispute over historical memory that risks undermining Warsaw’s staunch support for Kyiv against Russia’s invasion.
Nawrocki announced the decision in response to Zelensky’s decree renaming a Ukrainian army unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a nationalist force accused of participating in massacres of ethnic Poles during and after the Second World War. “There are limits in Polish-Ukrainian relations that cannot be crossed,” Nawrocki said . The Polish presidency framed the move as a necessary defence of historical truth amid what it described as an attempt by Kyiv to glorify organisations responsible for wartime atrocities.
The revocation landed just days before Poland is scheduled to host the annual Ukraine Recovery Conference in Warsaw, an event designed to rally international support for Kyiv’s post-war reconstruction. Relations between the two countries have been tense for weeks, with Warsaw and Kyiv trading sharp statements over competing narratives of the Second World War. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said he would return a Polish state award in protest, calling Nawrocki’s decision “reckless” and a “strategic mistake” that would “only benefit Moscow” .
Kyiv’s government condemned the move as an overreach that politicises shared wartime history. “No foreign president will dictate our history,” Sybiha told reporters, while Ukraine’s foreign ministry labelled the decision a breach of bilateral trust . Polish analysts warned the row could complicate military and humanitarian cooperation, despite Poland’s role as one of Ukraine’s most vocal backers since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. French newspaper *La Libre Belgique* described the move as “highly symbolic” and cautioned it could harm bilateral relations at a critical juncture .
The Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s oldest and most prestigious decoration, has been awarded to foreign leaders including US presidents and European monarchs. Its withdrawal from Zelensky marks an unprecedented rupture in Polish-Ukrainian ties and underscores the fragility of historical reconciliation between two nations locked in a geopolitical alliance against Moscow.
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Articles
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