Poland and Ukraine are Fighting the Past, and Only Moscow Gains
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s decision to grant an elite military unit the honorary title “Heroes of the UPA” has sparked a diplomatic dispute with Poland. While Ukraine views the UPA as independence fighters, Poland associates it with wartime massacres of Polish civilians. The controver
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When Volodymyr Zelenskyy awarded an elite Ukrainian military unit the honorary title “Heroes of the UPA” this week, the move triggered an immediate backlash in Poland. President Karol Nawrocki responded by calling for Zelenskyy to be stripped of Poland’s highest state distinction, turning a long-running historical dispute into a fresh diplomatic row between two of Europe’s closest wartime partners.
The argument centers on the legacy of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA, a nationalist formation whose place in public memory in each country could not be more different.
In Ukraine, the UPA is widely associated with the struggle for independence and resistance to Soviet rule, while in Poland it is remembered above all for the wartime massacres of Polish civilians in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia during the Second World War, crimes that the Polish parliament has recognized as genocide.
That divergence helps explain why the latest dispute has generated such a strong reaction across the Polish political spectrum, and not only from the predictable quarters. Nawrocki condemned the decision, but criticism has also come from figures with very different political backgrounds, underscoring how sensitive the issue remains in Poland.
Universal outrage
Former prime minister Leszek Miller, a veteran of the post-communist left, has argued that honoring the UPA was comparable to Germany naming a military unit after the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi mobile killing squads responsible for mass murder across Eastern Europe.
A commander of the Ukrainian military intelligence’s (HUR) Deep Strike unit, call-sign “Vector,” revealed that Ukraine routinely deploys hundreds of decoy drones during its long-range strike campaigns inside Russian territory. This fleet includes empty dummy aircraft alongside specially configured jet-powered drones engineered to trick Russian radar operators into seeing them as oncoming missiles.
Former Polish president Lech Wałęsa has likewise expressed outrage, saying that glorifying formations associated with the Volhynia massacres was unacceptable and deeply hurtful to the memory of the victims.
Lapping this up, meanwhile, will be Russia, because the dispute gives it three audiences and three tailored messages. To Poles, Moscow can say that Ukraine takes Polish support while honoring people associated with the murder of Polish civilians. To Ukrainians, it can say that Poland is exploiting historical pain to humiliate Kyiv during a war for survival. To wider Europe, it can revive its familiar claim that Ukrainian nationalism remains unreformed and that backing Kyiv means supporting a state built on extremist symbols.
Zelenskyy’s nationalist turn
Zelenskyy signed the decree on May 26, describing it as a measure to restore “the historic traditions of the national army” and recognize the unit’s role in defending Ukraine’s independence.
The decision, however, comes amid a broader effort by the presidential administration and political elites to elevate nationalist symbols and historical figures that have become more prominent in Ukraine’s wartime narrative.
A day earlier, Zelenskyy attended the reburial of Andriy Melnyk, a wartime nationalist leader whose remains were repatriated from Luxembourg, telling mourners that Melnyk had “returned to a different Ukraine.”
Ukraine’s leadership is building a wartime national canon linking current defenders with earlier generations who fought for independence. Photo: Office of the President
His remains were interred at the national military cemetery alongside soldiers killed in the war with Russia, a gesture linking the nationalist movement’s struggle for statehood with Ukraine’s current fight for survival.
The reburial forms part of a broader effort to build a national pantheon, a state-sponsored canon of historical heroes intended to connect earlier generations who fought for Ukrainian independence with those defending the country today.
Taken together, these steps suggest the decree was not an isolated act but part of a wider state-led attempt to weave nationalist figures and traditions into the official story of modern Ukraine.
Zelenskyy at his lowest point
These gestures arrive at the weakest moment of Zelenskyy’s wartime presidency. In November 2025, Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies exposed an alleged kickback scheme worth around $100 million centered on the state nuclear energy company Energoatom, uncovered as Ukrainian cities went dark in winter blackouts. Two ministers resigned — Energy Minster Svitlana Hrynchuk and Justice Minister Herman Halushchenko — amid the scandal. Timur Mindich, a co-owner of Zelenskyy’s former television production studio Kvartal 95, fled Ukraine hours before anti-corruption investigators arrived to search his home.
On November 28, Andriy Yermak, the president’s chief of staff and for years one of the most powerful figures in the country, resigned after investigators searched his home as part of the same corruption probe. No charges have been brought against Yermak.
Yermak’s fall handed the presidential office to Kyrylo Budanov, the former military intelligence chief. The figures now closest to the president come predominantly from the security and intelligence world rather than the diplomatic one. Nationalist memory is also the cheapest instrument Zelenskyy still controls outright, while the budget, the front line, and the corruption enquiries lie beyond his reach.
With Donald Trump having pressed Kyiv towards concessions on territory and NATO membership, and the popular former army commander Valerii Zaluzhny, now Ukraine’s ambassador to Britain and polling ahead of Zelenskyy in hypothetical post-war elections, waiting as a credible rival, embracing the wartime national canon buys patriotic credibility in advance against any future charge of capitulation.
Zelenskyy would almost certainly have been aware that honoring the UPA would provoke a strong reaction in Poland, where memories of Volhynia remain raw. Yet there was little reason to fear serious consequences. Nawrocki had already vetoed state aid to Ukrainian refugees, opposed Ukrainian NATO membership, and called EU accession premature.
With the relationship already under strain, the political cost of offending Warsaw looks manageable. Zelenskyy could also assume that Poland’s essential interests would prevail. Warsaw still sees a strong relationship with Ukraine as essential to its own security and to containing Russian power in the region.
Warsaw: a reaction shaped at home
Poland was already primed. In February, Oleksandr Alferov, head of Ukraine’s Institute of National Remembrance, had called the Volhynia massacres a “myth,” sparking anger across the Polish political spectrum.
When the new decree followed, the reply from Warsaw came fast and loud. Nawrocki said he would propose to the Chapter of the Order of the White Eagle, the body advising on Poland’s oldest state decoration, that Zelenskyy lose the award former president Andrzej Duda gave him in 2023, when it meets on June 8.
He said that Zelenskyy had handed “a lot of oxygen to Russian propaganda,” and had shown that Ukraine, in glorifying “bandits and murderers” from the UPA, was “not ready to be part of the European family.”
For Nawrocki, the reaction is both genuine and politically useful. As a former head of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, historical policy and the defense of Polish victims are central to his political identity, so his outrage over the UPA decree is therefore not simply tactical.
At the same time, the issue allows him to reinforce his credentials with conservative voters and guard against pressure from the hard-right Confederation party ahead of parliamentary elections due in 2027.
The government in Warsaw is caught between solidarity with its ally and public sentiment at home and does not want to be outflanked by the nationalist opposition on questions of history and national dignity.
The end of the emotional phase
The dispute is significant because it exposes a reality that has been developing for some time. The emotional phase of the Polish-Ukrainian relationship ended long ago.
In the first months after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, millions of Ukrainians found shelter in Poland, Polish citizens opened their homes to refugees, and Warsaw became Kyiv’s most vocal advocate within NATO and the European Union. The relationship carried an emotional charge that often overrode disagreements and historical grievances.
That phase has steadily receded. The grain dispute, arguments over refugee benefits, disputes over historical memory, and growing domestic political pressures on both sides have pushed the relationship back onto more traditional foundations.
See the original of this analysis for TVP World by Stuart Dowellhere.
