Poland to revoke Zelenskyy’s top honour over UPA tribute

Poland’s president moved to strip Volodymyr Zelenskyy of the Order of the White Eagle after Ukraine named a military unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a group tied in Polish memory to World War II massacres. The decision sharpened a dispute over wartime history that is now spilling into diplomacy between Warsaw and Kyiv.

Karol Nawrocki announced the move on 19 June 2026 after consulting the chapter of the Order of the White Eagle, the body that advises on the award. In his statement, he said he was acting “in light of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s consent to name one of the units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine ‘Heroes of the UPA.’” Polish law allows the president to revoke the honour if it was awarded on false pretences or if the recipient later becomes unworthy of it.

The Order of the White Eagle is Poland’s highest state honour and its oldest and most prestigious decoration. Zelenskyy received it in 2023 from then-president Andrzej Duda for services to security, resilience and the defence of human rights. Nawrocki’s move turned that gesture into a new front in an old argument: whether Ukraine’s wartime symbols should be treated as anti-Soviet resistance or as a reminder of ethnic violence against Poles.

That tension is why the UPA name carries such political weight in Poland. Polish sources link the group to massacres of Poles during World War II, especially in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, and say the killings claimed tens of thousands of civilian lives, with some estimates reaching as high as 100,000. France 24 has noted that the UPA remains infamous in Poland for its role in the killings of ethnic Poles and Jews, while Ukrainian memory politics are more conflicted. Some Ukrainians view the UPA as heroes of resistance against the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and as symbols of national independence.

Kyiv reacted sharply. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha called the move a strategic error that only benefits Moscow, while Ukraine denounced it as disrespectful and a strategic mistake. The episode lands at a sensitive moment, less than a week before Poland and Ukraine were due to jointly host a major reconstruction conference on Ukraine, underscoring how disputes over the Second World War can still complicate cooperation between countries facing the same Russian threat.