Poland revokes Zelensky honor after Ukraine names unit for UPA heroes

Poland has revoked Volodymyr Zelensky’s Order of the White Eagle after Ukraine named an elite Special Operations Forces unit after the “Heroes of the UPA,” turning a wartime memory dispute into a fresh diplomatic clash with major stakes for the alliance backing Kyiv. The Ukrainian decree entered into force on May 26, 2026, and Zelensky said it was meant to revive the historical traditions of the national army.

The backlash in Poland centers on the Volhynia massacres of 1943 to 1945, when members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army killed tens of thousands of Poles in Nazi-occupied areas of what is now western Ukraine. Poland treats those killings as genocide. Ukraine has not adopted that label and has generally cast the violence as a broader wartime tragedy in which both sides suffered and both sides bear responsibility.

Karol Nawrocki, Poland’s nationalist president and a historian of Nazi and Soviet crimes against Poles, said on May 29 that he would seek to strip Zelensky of the honor. Nawrocki formally revoked the award on June 19, 2026. Zelensky received the Order of the White Eagle in 2023 from then-President Andrzej Duda, making the decision an unusually pointed public rebuke from a state that has been one of Kyiv’s strongest allies since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha called the Polish move a “strategic error” and warned that it only helps Moscow. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk tried to blunt the fallout, saying the dispute delights Putin and that the “front line runs elsewhere.” Nawrocki, for his part, said the decision did not change Poland’s strategic support for Ukraine, but argued that naming a military unit after UPA figures crossed a line well beyond Ukraine’s domestic politics.

The timing sharpened the diplomatic risk. The row erupted just days before a Ukraine reconstruction conference in Gdansk and shortly before Zelensky was expected to visit Poland. It also landed at a moment when public sentiment in Poland has cooled, with refugee fatigue, disputes over grain imports, and repeated arguments over wartime memory all weighing on a partnership that remains strategically vital. For Warsaw and Kyiv, the fight over the UPA is not only about the past. It is a test of whether unresolved nationalist narratives can erode solidarity at the very moment Ukraine still needs it most.