In July 2023, the presidents of Poland and Ukraine commemorated the victims of a wave of violence that left tens of thousands of people dead during World War II.
Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Andrzej Duda, then Poland’s president, knelt side by side and placed candles in front of a memorial near the altar of a church in Lutsk, the capital of the Volyn region in northwestern Ukraine. In their social media posts, both individuals sent a positive message:
That proposition is being put to a tough test three years later, as a rekindled dispute over what Poland calls the Volhynian Massacre and Ukraine calls the Volyn Tragedy rocks relations between the neighbours and risks repercussions for Kyiv’s defence against Russia and for Ukraine’s EU integration.
The fuel for the flare-up was Zelenskyy’s decision in May to give a military unit a name honouring the “Heroes of the UPA” — the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which Poland says massacred some 100,000 Poles in the area, then under German control, in 1943-45, killings that Poland’s parliament has designated a genocide.
Ukraine rejects that designation and says Ukrainians also faced hatred from Poles. Thousands of Ukrainians were killed in reprisals.
The UPA was the military arm of nationalist resistance leader Stepan Bandera’s Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and fought against Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union at different times during the war. The groups are accused of carrying out murderous campaigns against Poles and Jews.
But many Ukrainians hail them as freedom fighters — a perception that has widened as the country tries to fight off a Russian invasion 35 years after it won independence from Moscow as the Soviet Union collapsed.
Poland, steeped in its own painful memories of the Nazi-Soviet invasion in 1939 and decades of dominance by Moscow after World War II, has been one of Ukraine’s strongest backers since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
‘Strategic Mistake’
As Zelenskyy’s appearance with Duda in 2023 indicated, both countries had largely managed to avoid historical tensions. But now, the public spat is injecting poison into bilateral relations and raising the prospect of broader problems at a crucial time.
“Wading into a conflict between politicians in Poland and Ukraine is a strategic mistake that will harm both sides: business-wise, geopolitically, and reputationally,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned in a post on X last month.
Ukraine may have more to lose.
“Ukraine risks seriously hurting its support from Poland,” Lucian Kim, senior Ukraine analyst at the International Crisis Group, told RFE/RL, stressing that this support is “crucial” for several reasons.
“Western military aid for Ukraine goes through Poland. Poland hosts 1 million Ukrainian refugees,” Kim said. “Polish support will also be necessary for Ukraine’s European Union aspirations.”
Polish President Karol Nawrocki (left) and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Warsaw late last year.
The key players in the dispute are Zelenskyy and Duda’s successor, Polish President Karol Nawrocki, a populist historian who is the former director of a World War II museum and was heading the Institute of National Remembrance when the conservative Law and Justice party (PiS) tapped him as its candidate in the 2025 election.
On June 19, Nawrocki announced he was stripping Zelenskyy of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state honour, over his “Heroes of the UPA” decision.
Zelenskyy returned the medal to Poland, and three of his predecessors who had received the same award — Leonid Kuchma, Viktor Yushchenko, and Petro Poroshenko — followed suit. Then, on June 28, he submitted legislation to parliament for the creation of a National Pantheon honouring key figures in Ukraine’s history, warning that “no one will ever tell us…which heroes to honour.”
A spokesman for Nawrocki, who had said Poland “must not remain indifferent to the affirmation of symbols of crime,” called the pantheon bill “the next stage of escalation.”
Campaign Trail
While rooted in bloodshed that occurred over 80 years ago, the spike in tensions stems in large part from domestic political considerations in both Ukraine and Poland, analysts and observers said.
In Poland, the dispute is part of a “pre-electoral environment” in which “the Ukraine factor can be used to win votes,” an EU official told RFE/RL, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject.
The opposition PiS is seeking to gain ground against Tusk’s more Ukraine-friendly Civic Coalition, which drove it from power in 2024, ahead of parliamentary elections that must be held by November 2027.
The dispute over the World War II-era killings could enable Nawrocki and the PiS to tap into substantial anti-Ukrainian sentiment in Poland, stoked by resentment over the influx of Ukrainians displaced by the Russian invasion. Opinion polls indicate that acceptance of Ukrainian refugees has declined dramatically as the war has dragged on.
In Ukraine, martial law has barred elections since the start of the full-scale invasion. But the prospect of a presidential vote in the not-so-distant future has loomed large amid intermittent external pressure and concerns among some Ukrainians over Zelenskyy’s seven-year grip on power. While his approval ratings remain strong, a kind of shadow campaign pitting Zelenskyy against potential rivals is underway.
“What’s clear is that Zelenskyy was acting purely on domestic motivation and was not considering how it might come across outside Ukraine,” Kim said of the decision to bestow the “Heroes of the UPA” name on a special operations unit of the armed forces.
“Zelenskyy is certainly wrapping himself in the cloak of Ukrainian nationalism and taking positions that he may not have taken earlier,” he said, adding that the Russian invasion has made forces like the UPA less controversial than they previously were inside Ukraine.
When Zelenskyy ran for president in 2019, “historical issues [and] the past were of no importance to him,” Ihor Hryniv, a political strategist who headed then-incumbent President Petro Poroshenko’s campaign headquarters in that election, told RFE/RL.
‘The Problems Ahead’
Now, Hryniv said, he is playing to the portion of the electorate that did not vote for him in 2019 and for whom historical memory is important — in part because his most prominent potential rivals “are all perceived as more patriotic than Zelenskyy himself”.
As a result, he argued, Zelenskyy now “sometimes runs faster than society itself” on issues involving nationalist figures of the past, and he “does not know the problems that may arise with neighbours or in Ukraine itself.”
The extent of those problems is not yet unclear.
Revoking Zelenskyy’s Order of the White Eagle “does not signify a change in the strategic direction of Polish security policy,” Nawrocki said in his announcement. “We have supported and continue to support Ukraine because we know that Russian aggression poses a threat to the security of Poland and all of Europe.”
But he warned that Ukraine’s EU path “requires a willingness to honestly confront the difficult chapters of its own history.
“A united Europe was built on the rejection of totalitarianism and the cult of violence. These principles must apply to everyone. For those who do not understand these principles, there can be no place in the European Union, and Poland will certainly not allow it,” Nawrocki said.
Asked if the dispute with Poland would affect Ukraine’s EU prospects, the EU official who spoke on condition of anonymity said: “Short term, no. Long term, possibly very much.”
Poland, one of the EU’s 27 members, recently gave its consent for the opening of a “cluster” of negotiation “chapters” for Ukraine next week, moving the painstaking process forward. But the official said that opening further clusters and closing chapters – that is, reaching agreement on them – might be difficult.
Whether or not the current dispute slows Ukraine’s path to the EU, Kim said, “it highlights the problems ahead” – problems that pertain to the present and the future rather than the past.
Polish farmers’ fears that Ukrainian supplies could put them out of business have led to protests, and Polish truckers have similar concerns about their livelihoods if Ukraine joins – worries that are shared in other countries in the region.
So far, there’s no sign that the flare-up between Kyiv and Warsaw will bleed into sometimes volatile US-Ukrainian relations or affect US President Donald Trump’s efforts to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. Trump praised Nawrocki at a meeting with Zelenskyy on the sidelines of a NATO summit in Turkey on July 8, but he didn’t mention the historical dispute.
Escalation Or De-Escalation
There have been efforts to de-escalate.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha met with his Polish counterpart, Radoslaw Sikorski, in Warsaw on July 3, where he proposed “a package of anti-crisis steps,” including meetings between diplomats and historians and outreach to religious leaders “to leverage their authority.” It was unclear if any agreements were reached.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (left) and Polish President Karol Nawrocki on the sidelines of a NATO summit in Ankara on July 8.
For the first time since the spat erupted, Zelenskyy and Nawrocki met for about an hour on July 8 on the sidelines of a NATO summit in Ankara. Nawrocki said they were “unable to resolve the historical issues,” but he suggested that he expected them to remain unresolved.
Zelenskyy called it an “important and necessary conversation,” and both presidents said that Russia is a common threat.
Tension persisted ahead of Poland’s annual commemoration of the victims on July 11. Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, former Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov, asserted in an interview with news outlet RBC-Ukraine earlier this week that he had information indicating that Poland was “preparing a whole series of…escalatory steps” and that the tension was likely to continue. He did not provide details or evidence.
While analysts say Zelenskyy may not have realised that naming a military unit after “Heroes of the UPA” would make waves outside Ukraine, Kyiv’s success in fighting Russian forces to a near standstill in a war many initially believed Ukraine would lose quickly may have bolstered his confidence, and that of other senior officials, on the world stage.
“Ukraine will not accept ultimatums from anyone in the world. The last [country] that tried to give us an ultimatum was the Russian Federation,” Budanov said. “No offence to Poland, but [Russia] is a little more powerful than Poland…. Do not speak to us with ultimatums.”
