By Dan Peleschuk and Anna Koper
KYIV/WARSAW, June 20 (Reuters) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Saturday he had returned a state decoration a day after Poland’s president said he had stripped him of the award in connection with a dispute over events in World War Two.
Three former Ukrainian presidents said they were also returning their state awards to Poland, as did other senior officials.
Polish President Karol Nawrocki said on Friday he had revoked the Order of the White Eagle awarded to Zelenskiy in 2023 after the Ukrainian president renamed a military unit in honour of World War Two-era Ukrainian insurgents accused of massacring Poles.
The row over the role of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) threatens to deepen a diplomatic rift between the close strategic partners as Kyiv rallies allies to push Russia to end its more than four-year-old war on Ukraine.
“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,” Zelenskiy wrote on X. “Today, I sent the Order back to the President of Poland.”
Zelenskiy posted a photo of the decoration being packed in a box and being sent to the Polish president’s office.
He said Ukraine was grateful for Poland’s support and pledged Kyiv would “remain open to all meaningful formats of engagement with Poland in order to try to avoid conflicting interpretations of the difficult and painful chapters of our shared past.”
Former Ukrainian Presidents Leonid Kuchma, Viktor Yushchenko and Petro Poroshenko also said they were handing back the Order of the White Eagle bestowed on them on grounds that the row was harming the attempts they had made to improve ties with Poland.
Zelenskiy’s chief of staff, Kyrylo Budanov, and Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha renounced other awards presented to them.
Warsaw is a strong supporter of Kyiv in the more than four-year-old conflict with Russia. But public sentiment towards Ukraine has become more negative in recent years due to weariness with large numbers of refugees, disputes over grain imports and the legacy of the World War Two massacres.
Some Ukrainians regard the UPA as heroes for the resistance they mounted against both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and as symbols of Kyiv’s struggle for independence from Moscow.
But the UPA was also involved in the Volhynia massacres, a series of killings from 1943 to 1945 in which Poland says around 100,000 Poles were killed by Ukrainian nationalists. Thousands of Ukrainians also died in reprisal killings.
PLAYING INTO RUSSIA’S HANDS
Members of Poland’s government, who are often at odds with Nawrocki, said the row sparked by the president’s decision to revoke the award was playing into Russia’s hands.
“The winner of the war of history and orders can only be Moscow,” Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski wrote on X.
Defence Minister Władyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz said the dispute meant relations with Ukraine were “heading in a very bad direction. Escalating tensions among allies only benefit the enemy.”
Nawrocki on Saturday dismissed the notion that the decision was to Moscow’s benefit, saying Polish pride had been offended.
“We know what the post-Soviet, now Russian, threat is. But we are a proud Polish nation and we have our pain threshold in matters that concern us and our allies,” he said at an event in southern Poland.
“And this pain threshold has been exceeded, which is why I stripped President Zelenskiy of the Order of the White Eagle.”
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Sybiha had earlier called Nawrocki’s decision a “strategic error” and said no president of a foreign country “is going to dictate our history to us”.
In announcing his decision to revoke the award to the Ukrainian president, Nawrocki said the move was “not directed against the Ukrainian people. It does not signify a change in the strategic direction of Polish security policy.”
(Reporting by Dan Peleschuk and Anna Koper, Writing by Ron Popeski, Editing by Franklin Paul and Deepa Babington)
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