Poland weighs stripping Zelenskiy’s top honor over UPA-linked unit name

Karol Nawrocki moved to put Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s highest Polish honor under review after Kyiv renamed a military unit in a way that revived one of Poland’s most painful wartime memories. The Polish president said he wanted the matter brought before a state body, later identified as the Council of National Security, and said the dispute could be discussed there on June 8.

The trigger was a Ukrainian decree that took effect on May 26, 2026, recognizing a special forces unit with a name linked to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA. Ukraine said the change was adopted “with the aim of reviving the historical traditions of the national army.” In Poland, that explanation collided with a far darker memory: the UPA is tied in Polish national consciousness to the Volhynia massacres, in which Polish civilians were killed during World War II.

Nawrocki said he was outraged by the move and argued that glorifying the UPA had given Russian propaganda “ample oxygen” for disinformation. That complaint showed how the issue reached beyond history into the information war surrounding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where symbolism, memory and battlefield alliances now overlap. Poland has been one of Ukraine’s most important backers since the full-scale invasion, supplying military, political and humanitarian aid, but the dispute exposed how fragile that solidarity can be when wartime trauma is reopened.

Zelenskiy received the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s oldest and highest distinction, from Andrzej Duda in Warsaw on April 5, 2023. Duda said at the time that Poland had been helping Ukraine since the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion and honored Zelenskiy for service to security, resilience and human rights. Nawrocki’s push to revisit that award gave the row a symbolic weight far beyond the title itself.

The controversy lands in a country where historical memory is not abstract politics but a living fault line. Polish accounts of the Volhynia massacres commonly describe the killings as the murder or genocide of Polish civilians, with estimates often placed at about 100,000 dead, while other historical summaries cite 50,000 to 60,000 Polish dead in Volhynia alone. In Ukraine, some nationalists still treat UPA fighters as symbols of anti-Soviet resistance. That clash of narratives has strained Polish-Ukrainian relations before, and now it is testing the limits of wartime unity again.