Poland, Ukraine: Dispute between two close allies deepens

For a long time, Poland and Ukraine were the staunchest of allies.

The political and military support Ukraine received from Poland made a major contribution to Ukraine's ability to successfully defend itself in the early days of Russia's full-scale invasion, which began in February 2022.

Now, however, a dispute about the past, which has been rumbling on for weeks, is plunging the two neighbors into an ever-deepening crisis.

Withdrawal of Poland's highest state honor

On Friday evening, Polish President Karol Nawrocki announced on X that he was revoking the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest state honor, from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

In doing so, Nawrocki made good on a threat he made several weeks previously during the dispute about the name given to a Ukrainian special forces unit, "Heroes of the UPA."

The announcement triggered strong responses in the Ukrainian capital.

"We believed that the Order of the White Eagle, awarded in 2023, was meant for the Ukrainian People and our army. That is what was said at the time. Today, I sent the Order back to the President of Poland," Zelenskyy wrote on his social media accounts on Saturday.

He thanked Poland for its support and solidarity thus far and said that since the honor had also been bestowed on Russian Empress Catherine II, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, "we in Ukraine will not argue with this."

He also posted photos without comments showing him sending the order back to Nawrocki via the private Ukrainian postal and courier service Nova Post.

Nawrocki motivated by domestic politics?

Speaking in an interview with the Ukrainian television channel 1+1, Zelenskyy later accused his Polish counterpart of having taken the step because of next year's parliamentary election in Poland.

"President Karol Nawrocki is fighting for the position of his party against the prime minister [Donald Tusk]. It is the same thing that [former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor] Orban did. It is the wrong way. I think it will end badly," said Zelenskyy.

Ukrainian politicians return honors

Over the weekend, there was an almost united response from politicians in Ukraine.

Three of the country's four living former presidents — Leonid Kuchma, Viktor Yushchenko and Petro Poroshenko — returned their Polish orders. The fourth, the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych, fled to Russia in 2014.

Presidential Chief of Staff Kyrylo Budanov and Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha also returned their honors.

"Nawrocki has become the destroyer of the positive progress we have made in recent times. It's not for nothing that he receives applause from Moscow," said Sybiha, adding, "No president of another country will dictate our history to us."

Without going into the specifics, the foreign minister said that Ukraine would mirror Nawrocki's move.

The UPA: the root of the present dispute

This is the most serious dispute between Warsaw and Kyiv since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine over four years ago.

It began at the end of May, when Zelenskyy issued a decree approving the request from a special forces unit within the Ukrainian army to use the honorary name "Heroes of the UPA."

In doing so, Zelenskyy expressly honored the memory of the fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which continued to put up armed resistance to the Soviet regime in Ukraine well into the 1950s.

This resistance is very much to the fore in Ukraine's current public culture of remembrance and is one of its central elements.

The view of the UPA in Poland is, however, very different indeed.

During World War II and starting in 1943, the UPA carried out several massacres, targeting the Polish population in the western Ukrainian region of Volhynia, while fighting for an independent Ukraine. In total, UPA units killed around 100,000 civilians.

Up to 20,000 Ukrainians were killed during later acts of retaliation by Polish partisans.

The Polish parliament declared the UPA crimes a genocide in 2016.

Setback after cautious progress

The issue of the way this past is judged has for decades been a source of political and diplomatic disputes between Poland and Ukraine.

For a time, as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there was a break in these disputes.

Last year, however, Volodymyr Zelenskyy agreed to the Polish request to have mass graves in Volhynia containing Polish victims opened for exhumations. The authorization for the opening of the first mass graves was issued by the Ukrainian Culture Ministry in early June.

Nawrocki's decision to strip Zelenskyy of the Order of the White Eagle has likely dealt a severe blow to this cautious process of addressing the past.

"There are limits that must not be crossed in Polish-Ukrainian relations," the Polish president said in the video statement he posted on X last Friday.

He also threatened to block Ukraine's accession to the EU.

"A united Europe was built on the rejection of totalitarianism and the cult of violence. These principles must apply to everyone. For those who do not understand this, there can be no place in the European Union, and Poland will certainly not allow it," said the Polish president.

Nawrocki not interested in detente?

It was Nawrocki's predecessor, Andrzej Duda, who awarded Zelenskyy the Order of the White Eagle in 2023.

Duda had made the military alliance with Ukraine a Polish foreign policy priority.

It hasn't just been the military and political support from Warsaw that has been a considerable help to Ukraine since 2022, Poland also took in millions of Ukrainian war refugees.

However, the mood has darkened in recent times. Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees have increasingly become a major domestic political issue in Poland.

Above all, right-leaning Polish citizens are criticizing welfare payments for Ukrainians in Poland and questioning Warsaw's military support for Kyiv.

Writing in the Polish daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, columnist Bartosz Wielinski said that Nawrocki is not interested in a detente between Warsaw and Kyiv for domestic political reasons.

The reason, wrote Wielinski, is that the right-wing conservative president is engaged in a battle with Tusk's center-left government in the hope of smoothing the path for right-wing and far-right opposition parties to return to power in the 2027 parliamentary election.

A dilemma for Tusk

Nawrocki's move has put pro-European Prime Minister Donald Tusk in an awkward position because as PM, he is required to countersign the document stripping Zelenskyy of the order.

If he does sign, he will damage relations with Poland's eastern neighbor, on whose military success against Russia Poland's security also depends. If, on the other hand, he refuses to sign, Poland's right-wing will label him a traitor who is turning a blind eye to the feelings of his compatriots.

For this reason, Tusk has been engaged in damage limitation ever since the dispute began. While he, too, considers the renaming of the Ukrainian special force unit a scandal and an affront to the feelings of Polish citizens, he also criticizes Nawrocki's hardline response.

"Wading into a conflict between politicians in Poland and Ukraine is a strategic mistake that will harm both sides: business-wise, geopolitically, and reputationally. And in politics, as we know, a mistake is worse ⁠than a crime," Tusk warned on X on Sunday, adding that Putin is the only person who is pleased about the rift between Poland and Ukraine.

Prominent Polish intellectuals and civilian activists responded to Nawrocki's Friday announcement at the weekend by awarding Zelenskyy the "Civilian Order of the Future," an honor invented especially for this occasion.

"The Polish president is fueling Russian propaganda," they wrote. "As citizens of the Republic of Poland, we are awarding our own medal. In this way, we are demonstrating that many Poles refuse to be turned against the Ukrainians."

This article was originally published in German.