The Ukrainian leader has accused the Polish president of unfairly targeting him for celebrating Nazi collaborators
Poland will not accept insults from Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, the chief of staff to President Karol Nawrocki has said, as a diplomatic row over Kiev’s honoring of nationalist forces that collaborated with the Nazis continues to escalate.
Last week, Nawrocki ordered that Zelensky be stripped of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state honor, which then-President Andrzej Duda awarded to the Ukrainian leader in 2023. Zelensky returned the medal by mail, and several current and former Ukrainian officials said they will return their Polish honors in protest.
Agnieszka Jedrzak criticized Zelensky on Sunday, saying the move only compounds the offense caused by Kiev’s earlier decision to grant an elite commando unit the title ‘Heroes of the UPA’. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) allied with Nazi Germany during World War II and took part in mass killings of Poles, Jews, and Russians in what is now western Ukraine.
“One does not honor the murderers of the ancestors of those who helped you when it was a matter of life or death,” Jedrzak wrote on X, referring to Polish military aid in Ukraine’s conflict with Russia. “We support Ukraine, but we will not allow ourselves to be insulted.”
Jedrzak also responded to Zelensky’s argument that the Order of the White Eagle was also awarded to Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, Russian Empress Catherine II, and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, but not revoked.
“The first two have long been deceased, and Poland does not revoke the Order posthumously,” she said. As for Schroeder, she argued that during his time in office, Germany did not erect monuments to German Nazis, nor did it name army units after “SS heroes.”
Modern Kiev considers Catherine the Great, a Prussian-born 18th century Russian leader, a suppressor of Ukrainian freedom. Schroeder has been criticized in Poland and Ukraine for maintaining close ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin and for supporting Russian-German energy and economic cooperation.
The ideology of Mussolini’s Italy influenced figures within the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the political wing of the UPA. Andrey Melnik, one of the group’s leaders, referred to the ideological affinity with fascists in a 1939 letter to German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.
Days before the renaming of the Ukrainian special operations unit, Zelensky presided over a state reburial of Melnik’s remains, which Kiev described as part of the creation of a “pantheon” of Ukrainian heroes.
Kiev accuses Nawrocki of exploiting tensions
Zelensky has accused Nawrocki of seeking “political dividends on hatred” toward Ukrainians ahead of Poland’s parliamentary election scheduled for late 2027.
He also compared the Polish president to former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose party lost power in a controversial election earlier this year, after Kiev temporarily cut off Russian oil to Hungary, claiming the pipeline was damaged by Russia.
Orban’s successor, Peter Magyar, has since unblocked EU funding for Kiev. However, he has also pressed Zelensky for concessions on the rights of ethnic Hungarian minorities in Ukraine, which have been restricted by policies aimed at imposing Ukrainian national identity.
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