On 19 June, Polish President Karol Nawrocki announced the withdrawal of Ukraine’s highest state honour, the Order of the White Eagle, from President Volodymyr Zelensky, citing the Ukrainian leader’s decree naming a special forces unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Zelensky responded within hours by posting the medal back to Warsaw, noting sarcastically that the order had been bestowed upon Catherine the Great, Benito Mussolini and Gerhard Schröder without being revoked. His foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, presidential chief of staff Kyrylo Budanov and ambassador to Poland Vasyl Bodnar immediately renounced their own Polish awards, and by the following day the former presidents Leonid Kuchma, Viktor Yushchenko and Petro Poroshenko had followed suit.

Viewed from Warsaw, Nawrocki’s move was a defence of national memory. In his televised address he stressed that the UPA massacred at least 100,000 Polish civilians in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia during the Second World War, and that glorifying its name exceeded Poland’s “pain threshold”. He insisted, however, that the decision “does not signify a change in the strategic direction of Polish security policy” towards Ukraine. Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a political rival of the president, publicly urged both leaders to “calm emotions, not stoke tensions”, warning that the conflict “delights Putin and shocks our allies”. In Kyiv, the rhetoric was sharper: Budanov branded the revocation “an unfriendly act toward our people” and “a gift to the Moscow aggressor”, while Sybiha called it “a strategic mistake from which only Moscow benefits”. Zelensky expressed gratitude to the Polish people for their support, but gave no indication he would withdraw the unit’s designation.

The diplomatic blow-up risks overshadowing the Ukraine Recovery Conference due to open in Gdańsk next week, where Zelensky was expected to attend. It also tests the durability of a partnership that has been vital for the transit of Western military aid and the hosting of over a million Ukrainian refugees. Moscow moved quickly to exploit the rift: former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev jeered that Zelensky now had “more space on his green sweatshirt for Hitler’s Iron Cross”. In Tallinn, the chair of the Estonian parliament’s foreign affairs committee called the distraction “deeply sad”. France’s far-right leader Florian Philippot argued that the episode demonstrated why Western aid to Kyiv should cease. No statements were immediately issued by Washington or by EU institutions in Brussels.

The episode reopens a fault line that has plagued Polish-Ukrainian relations for decades. The UPA fought for an independent Ukrainian state against both Nazi and Soviet forces, but its partisans also carried out ethnic cleansing of Polish civilians. Poland classifies the killings as genocide; Ukraine accepts the historical tragedy but rejects the label, preferring to frame the UPA as freedom fighters. Recent months had brought tentative progress, including Ukrainian permission for the exhumation of Polish victims. Zelensky’s May decree, however, revived the dispute. The legal status of the ordnance revocation remains unclear: under Polish constitutional rules, the president’s act may require the countersignature of the prime minister, which has not yet been given. Until publication in the official gazette, Zelensky formally remains a holder of the Order of the White Eagle. The Gdańsk gathering is now likely to become the next arena for managing a crisis that neither capital can afford to let spiral.