Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Saturday that he has returned Poland’s highest state honor, the Order of the White Eagle, to his Polish counterpart, Karol Nawrocki, who revoked the award amid a dispute over historical memory.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine remains open to dialogue with Poland to address difficult chapters of their shared history and thanked the Polish people for their support and cooperation during the Russia-Ukraine war.
He underlined that the award, which represents Poland’s highest honor, requires “not only merit but also respect for the values that form the foundation of our community.”
“Therefore, if it is considered that this special symbol may remain with Catherine II, Benito Mussolini, and Gerhard Schroder, then we in Ukraine will not argue with that,” he wrote on US social media platform X.
He also said that Kyiv believed that the Order of the White Eagle, awarded in 2023, was meant for the Ukrainians and their army.
“That is what was said at the time. Today, I sent the Order back to the President of Poland,” he said.
Nawrocki on Friday revoked the Order of the White Eagle following outrage in Poland over Kyiv's recent move to name a military unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a nationalist formation that Polish historians and officials hold responsible for the mass killing of tens of thousands of Polish civilians in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia during World War II.
In a statement, Nawrocki stressed that the move was directed at the Ukrainian government's actions rather than the Ukrainian people and insisted it did not signal any change in Poland's strategic support for Ukraine.
The UPA remains one of the most contentious issues in Polish-Ukrainian relations. While many Ukrainians view the group as part of the struggle for independence against both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Poland regards the massacres of 1943-44 as an act of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
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