Volodymyr Zelensky said he returned Poland's highest honour this week after Karol Nawrocki said he was stripping him of the award. The move pushed a dispute over Poland and Ukraine's wartime history into the open, even as Zelensky said Ukraine remains open to all meaningful formats of engagement with Poland.
The award at the center of the row was the Polish Order of the White Eagle, bestowed on Zelensky in 2023 by Andrzej Duda. Zelensky also said he was grateful to the Polish People for their support and co-operation, a reminder that the argument is unfolding between two governments whose ties were built during Russia's war against Ukraine.
Poland and Ukraine history row
The trigger was Ukraine's decision last month to rename a Ukrainian army unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Karol Nawrocki called that move outrageous, incomprehensible and deeply disappointing, and said, "For the overwhelming majority of Polish society, the UPA remains, above all, a formation responsible for the brutal crimes committed against citizens of the Republic of Poland during World War Two".
That dispute reaches back to the 1940s and 1950s, when the Ukrainian Insurgent Army existed. Poland says the group carried out a genocide of about 100,000 ethnic Poles in Volhynia in 1943-45, which is why the symbol and the name carry such different meanings in Poland and Ukraine.
Karol Nawrocki and support
Nawrocki said the row would not affect Poland's support for Ukraine against Russia. He called the dispute "It hurts not only our historical memory. It also undermines the trust built up over the years and in recent months" while also describing Ukraine's unit renaming as outrageous, incomprehensible and deeply disappointing.
Donald Tusk warned that any feud between Zelensky and Nawrocki delights Vladimir Putin and urged them to calm emotions, not to stoke tensions. That leaves Poland publicly backing Ukraine while its new president and Ukraine's president argue over how each country reads the same war-era history.
Luxembourg talks this week
Ukraine attended the first phase of membership negotiations in Luxembourg this week, keeping the diplomacy moving even as the honour dispute sharpened. Zelensky 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 their shared past.
For readers tracking the fallout, the immediate practical point is that Poland's military and political backing for Ukraine remains in place, but the trust between Zelensky and Nawrocki now depends on whether both sides keep the argument inside diplomacy rather than history-war rhetoric. Zelensky's return of the Polish Order of the White Eagle is the clearest sign yet that the row has moved from a symbolic disagreement to an active test of the relationship.
