Poland Revokes Zelenskyy’s Highest State Honor Over WWII-Era Military Unit Dispute
Polish President Karol Nawrocki revoked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state honor, on Friday after Kyiv declined to reverse the naming of a military unit after a World War II-era group accused of massacring Polish civilians.
Nawrocki announced the decision in a video statement, saying Warsaw had repeatedly asked Ukraine to reconsider the unit’s name, but that Kyiv’s position had not changed. “Historical truth is not, and can never be, a bargaining chip,” he said.
The revocation strips Zelenskyy of an honor he received in 2023 from then-President Andrzej Duda for his contributions to Polish-Ukrainian relations and human rights defense. It comes eight days before Poland hosts the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Gdansk, a summit Zelenskyy had been expected to attend and has triggered a reciprocal snub from Kyiv that exposes deepening cracks in Warsaw’s wartime solidarity with Ukraine more than four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion.
A Dispute Rooted in World War II
The clash centers on a May 26 decree in which Zelenskyy named a Ukrainian Special Operations Forces unit after the UPA, a nationalist paramilitary group that fought Nazi German and Soviet forces in the 1940s and 1950s. The UPA is blamed in Poland for the deaths of an estimated 100,000 Polish civilians, mostly in the Volyn region, an episode widely known in Poland as the Volyn massacres, according to Bloomberg.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha rejected his own Polish honor in response the Commander’s Cross Order of Merit conferred on him by Duda in 2022. Sybiha called Nawrocki’s decision “a strategic mistake,” saying Polish politicians had let emotion drive an unjustified step that benefits only Moscow, the Kyiv Independent reported.
Verkhovna Rada Chairman Ruslan Stefanchuk went further, describing the timing of the announcement, a week ahead of the Gdansk summit, as deliberate and damaging to the wartime partnership between the two countries.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who had urged both leaders to avoid escalation, wrote on social media platform X that the conflict between Poland and Ukraine delights Russian President Vladimir Putin and unsettles their Western allies, according to GMA News. He renewed his call for both sides to tone down rhetoric and pursue dialogue instead.
A Wartime Alliance Under Strain
Poland has been among Ukraine’s closest allies since Russia’s 2022 invasion, supplying military aid, serving as a key logistics corridor for Western weapons shipments, and hosting close to 1 million Ukrainian refugees. A poll conducted this month found that 52% of Poles said their views of Ukraine and Ukrainians had worsened because of the unit-naming dispute, the Kyiv Independent reported.
Nawrocki, who took office in 2025 and has previously voiced skepticism about fast-tracking Ukraine’s European Union membership, linked the dispute to Kyiv’s EU aspirations, saying nations must confront difficult chapters of their history to belong in the bloc. The remark came days after all 27 EU member states agreed on June 15 to open the first accession negotiation cluster with Ukraine and Moldova.
Nawrocki said the revocation does not signal a reduction in Poland’s military and humanitarian support for Ukraine against Russia. Neither Zelenskyy nor his office had publicly responded to the revocation as of Friday, and it remains unclear whether he will attend next week’s Gdansk conference amid the worsening diplomatic rift.
