A dispute has erupted between Ukraine and Poland in which the past has again proved stronger than diplomatic caution. Polish President Karol Nawrocki’s decision to strip Volodymyr Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle over Ukraine’s honoring of a military unit linked to the UPA quickly grew into a broader political conflict.
In response, Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukrainian military intelligence, said he was renouncing the Golden Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, awarded to him last year. He called the Polish move a gift to Russia and warned against crude political speculation over tragic pages of shared history.
This is not an ordinary exchange of symbolic gestures. Ukraine and Poland are countries whose security is now closely connected. Poland is a rear base, a transit corridor, a political advocate for Ukraine in Europe and one of NATO’s key eastern flanks. Any rupture between Kyiv and Warsaw therefore matters far beyond protocol.
For Daycom, this crisis is a warning: historical memory between allies does not disappear under the pressure of war. It can be postponed, softened and framed by diplomacy, but it does not vanish. If it is not discussed honestly and carefully, it returns at the worst possible moment — when Moscow needs cracks in European support for Ukraine.
The Polish reaction has its own logic. For a significant part of Polish society, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army is inseparable from the Volhynia tragedy and the mass killings of Poles during World War II. This is not a marginal issue, but part of national memory, family history and political identity.
For Ukraine, the UPA carries a different set of meanings: anti-imperial resistance, the struggle for independence, war against totalitarian regimes and the symbol of a national liberation movement. This memory is not artificial either. It has grown stronger after Russia’s invasion, when history again became a language of resistance.
The conflict lies precisely there. The same name can mean freedom struggle to one side and pain, crime and unfinished mourning to the other. A politician who touches such a subject without a precise sense of limits starts a process that is difficult to control afterward.
Nawrocki chose the harshest form of response: stripping Zelensky of Poland’s highest honor. That decision could not remain only a domestic Polish gesture. For Ukraine, Zelensky is not simply a president, but a political symbol of resistance to Russia. A blow to his state decoration is inevitably perceived in Kyiv as a blow to wartime partnership.
Budanov answered in the same symbolic field. His refusal of the Polish award is not only a personal reaction. It is a signal that the Ukrainian side is not ready to accept the public humiliation of its president while the country is fighting for survival. Especially when such a step can be used by Russian propaganda.
Moscow does indeed gain more from this dispute than it may seem. It does not need to invent a new story. It is enough to show that even Ukraine’s closest partners are quarreling over the past, exchanging demarches and placing historical grievances above strategic unity. For the Russian information machine, this is ready-made material.
It is important here not to deny Polish pain or devalue the Ukrainian experience. Both are real. The danger begins when memory is turned into an instrument of current politics rather than a space for a difficult but necessary conversation. The tragedies of World War II cannot be canceled by wartime necessity. But they also cannot be used to destroy the alliance of the present.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has urged both sides to remain calm. His position shows that Poland itself is not fully united on how to respond. For Warsaw, support for Ukraine remains a matter of national security. If Russia succeeds against Ukraine, Poland receives a far more dangerous eastern border.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha called Nawrocki’s decision a strategic mistake. The word “strategic” is the important part. The mistake is not that Poland speaks about Volhynia. It has the right and duty to speak about its dead. The mistake is when a historical signal is delivered in a way that weakens the common position against Russia.
Ukraine also cannot afford carelessness on this subject. Honoring military traditions during war has mobilizing power, but it does not exist in a vacuum. Every such gesture is read not only in Ukraine, but also in Poland, Israel, Germany, the United States and other countries where memory of World War II has its own painful coordinates.
Political maturity does not mean abandoning one’s own history under pressure from allies. It means finding a way to name one’s struggle without showing contempt for another people’s mourning. Ukraine can honor anti-imperial resistance, but it must find language that does not reopen old wounds where a modern coalition is needed.
Poland, for its part, must distinguish between the historical demand for justice and a political demonstration that strikes at a country holding back Russia at the cost of daily losses. Stripping Zelensky of the order may satisfy part of the domestic audience, but it brings neither historical truth nor Polish security closer.
The most difficult thing in Ukrainian-Polish relations is that both sides have grounds for pain and pride at the same time. Poland remembers murdered Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. Ukraine remembers decades of statelessness, repression, the struggle for independence and today’s Russian aggression. These memories do not automatically merge into one convenient history.
That is why what is needed is not a war of medals, but difficult institutional work: exhumations, archives, historical commissions, shared memorial formulas, education, a language of compassion and political restraint. Memory does not become weaker when it is moved from gestures into work. On the contrary, only then does it stop being a weapon in the hands of populists.
For Kyiv and Warsaw, the main task now is to prevent this crisis from becoming a new norm. Symbolic demarches accumulate quickly. Today they are orders and medals. Tomorrow they may be summits, statements, blockages, mutual insults in parliaments and rising distrust in both societies. That is how a strategic partnership begins to lose its shape.
Russia has long worked with the historical traumas of its neighbors. Its goal is simple: to make Poles and Ukrainians look at one another through past crimes rather than through the present threat. The Kremlin did not create the Volhynia tragedy and cannot erase its meaning, but it knows how to use any unresolved issue as political explosive material.
Ukraine and Poland do not have to share the same memory. That is impossible. But they do have to share a sense of danger. If history becomes a reason for mutual humiliation, the winner is the power that wants to see them weaker separately. If history becomes the basis for an honest, difficult and institutional conversation, it can stop being a mine.
The dispute over honors has shown how thin the fabric of the Ukrainian-Polish alliance remains. It is strong when the subject is weapons, borders, NATO, the EU and the Russian threat. It is vulnerable when the subject is memory, symbols and the language of commemoration.
That is why this crisis cannot be swept under the carpet. It must be stopped before it becomes a convenient political habit. Ukraine and Poland have too much future in common to allow the past to work for Moscow.
