KYIV, June 20 - Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced on Saturday that he had returned a Polish state decoration, a day after Poland's head of state said he had stripped the award in relation to a dispute over how events from World War Two are commemorated.
Polish President Karol Nawrocki said on Friday he had revoked the medal that was given to Zelenskiy in 2023. Nawrocki said his decision followed Kyiv’s choice to rename a military unit in honor of Ukrainian insurgents from the World War Two era who have been accused of committing massacres against Poles.
The disagreement over the historical role of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA, has the potential to widen a diplomatic rupture between two countries that are strategic partners as Kyiv seeks to marshal support from allies to pressure Russia to end its war against Ukraine.
Writing on X, Zelenskiy said that the Order of the White Eagle, which was conferred in 2023, had been intended for the Ukrainian people and the country’s armed forces. He added that he had sent the decoration back to the Polish president.
He published a photograph showing the decoration being placed in a box and dispatched to the office of the Polish president. In the same post Zelenskiy expressed gratitude for Poland’s support and said Ukraine 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."
Meanwhile, Zelenskiy’s chief of staff, Kyrylo Budanov, said he would renounce the Golden Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, which had been awarded to him last year. Budanov described his decision as a protest and characterized the revocation as "a gift" for Russia.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha criticized Nawrocki’s action as a "strategic error," saying no foreign president "is going to dictate our history to us."
Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who has been identified as an opponent of Nawrocki, urged calm from both sides as the dispute unfolded.
In announcing the revocation, Nawrocki said the step was "not directed against the Ukrainian people. It does not signify a change in the strategic direction of Polish security policy." Poland remains a strong backer of Kyiv in the more than four-year-old conflict with Russia.
Public attitudes in Poland toward Ukraine have cooled in recent years, the result of several pressures cited by officials and commentators: fatigue over large numbers of refugees, disagreements over grain imports, and lingering tensions tied to the legacy of wartime massacres.
Views within Ukraine about the UPA differ sharply. Some Ukrainians regard the insurgents as heroes for fighting both Soviet and Nazi control and as emblems of Ukraine’s struggle for independence from Moscow. At the same time, the UPA was implicated in the Volhynia massacres, a series of killings between 1943 and 1945 that Poland says claimed the lives of around 100,000 Poles at the hands of Ukrainian nationalists.
The violence of that period also produced reprisal killings that resulted in thousands of Ukrainian deaths.
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