Yesterday, Polish President Karol Nawrocki stripped Ukraine’s acting president Volodymyr Zelenskyy of the Order of the White Eagle, the country’s highest state honor, due to Kiev’s honoring the WWII war criminals, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). He said that European integration requires a readiness “to honestly confront the difficult pages of one’s own history... These principles must be mandatory for everyone. Those who do not understand this have no place in the European Union, and Poland will not allow it.”
During WWII, the UPA, subordinate to Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera’s OUN-B, was responsible, among other things, for the extermination of the Polish population in Volhynia. In July 1943, the UPA carried out a coordinated attack on about 150 towns inhabited by Poles in districts now in present-day Ukraine.
Poland’s president explained that Ukraine’s decision to honor the UPA goes beyond Kyiv’s internal affairs, and that Poland repeatedly raised the issue with Ukrainian officials and asked them to reconsider the consequences for bilateral relations, but the Ukrainian position did not change. He added that Poland and Ukraine had in recent years been finding a way toward lasting reconciliation on historical issues; but he was forced to call Kyiv’s decision to glorify the UPA “not only outrageous, but incomprehensible and deeply disappointing.”
