KYIV - Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff said on Saturday he was renouncing a Polish state medal after President Karol Nawrocki stripped Zelensky of Poland’s top honour over a historical dispute.
The move by Kyrylo Budanov threatens to deepen a diplomatic rift between the close strategic partners as Kyiv rallies its allies to push Russia to end its war on Ukraine.
Nawrocki said on Friday he was revoking the Order of the White Eagle, bestowed by his predecessor Andrzej Duda, after Zelensky renamed a military unit in honour of World War II-era Ukrainian insurgents blamed for massacring Poles.
The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) remains a highly polarising historical topic. While Poland views the UPA as a brutal paramilitary organisation responsible for war crimes, many in Ukraine regard them as nationalist heroes who fought for independence against Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Poland accused the UPA of carrying out the ethnic cleansing and massacre of an estimated 100,000 Polish civilians during World War II. The killings, primarily concentrated in Nazi-occupied regions of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, were officially recognised as genocide by the Polish parliament in 2016.
Budanov said he was renouncing the Golden Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, awarded to him last year, to protest against the treatment of Zelensky.
He described Warsaw’s decision to strip the Ukrainian president of the honour as “a gift” for Russia.
“Our nations have long-standing relations and different pages of history — both heroic and tragic,” Budanov said in a post on social media. “However, this should be an occasion for deep reflection, not crude political speculation.”
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha had earlier called Nawrocki’s decision a “strategic error”, and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a Nawrocki opponent, urged both leaders to remain calm.
