Polish president strips Zelenskyy of honor over naming army unit after WWII group

WARSAW, Poland -- Polish President Karol Nawrocki said Friday he will strip Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Poland's highest state honor over the Ukraine leader's decision to name a military unit after a Ukrainian paramilitary organization accused of massacring Poles during World War II.

Zelenskyy was awarded the Order of the White Eagle in 2023 by Poland's then President Andrzej Duda for his services to security, resilience and the defence of human rights.

But it will now be revoked after Zelenskyy issued a decree on May 26 naming a military unit of Ukraine's Special Operations Forces after the UPA — the Ukrainian Insurgent Army — which operated during the 1940s and 1950s and which is accused in Poland of mass killings.

“For the majority of Polish society, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army remains above all a formation responsible for cruel crimes against the citizens of the Polish Republic during World War II,” Nawrocki said in a 13-minute address on social media.

Nawrocki said his decision to revoke the honor did not mean Poland’s support for Ukraine in its defense against Russia would decrease.

Next week, Poland is hosting a major event on Ukraine's post-war reconstruction, with Zelenskyy expected to attend.

Zelenskyy’s decree said the designation was meant to restore the historical traditions of the national military and to recognize the unit’s performance in defending Ukraine’s territorial integrity and independence.

The UPA was a military organization that fought for Ukrainian independence against both Nazi German and Soviet forces. But it is accused in Poland for the wartime killings of tens of thousands of Poles, most in the Nazi-occupied regions of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. In 2016, the Polish parliament recognized the crimes committed by UPA as genocide.

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Ukrainians say armed formations on both sides, including the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and Polish underground forces, were involved in attacks and reprisals that led to large-scale civilian casualties among both Poles and Ukrainians.

Poland's liberal Prime Minister Donald Tusk was also critical of the Ukrainian decree, but he also warned that Russia's President Vladimir Putin might benefit from the two countries being in conflict about the past.

Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said in a statement on June 3 that the escalation of tensions between the two countries served neither Ukrainians nor Poles and urged both sides to lower the emotional temperature and leave sensitive chapters of their shared history to professional historians.

Poland and Ukraine had recently made progress on the issue of exhumation of Polish victims. A meeting between the two presidents in December in Warsaw had signaled progress on historical reconciliation.

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Hanna Arhirova contributed to this report from Kyiv, Ukraine.