President Karol Nawrocki has decided to revoke the Order of the White Eagle from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The official statement on the matter has been published on the website of the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland.
The decision is directly linked to recent actions by the Ukrainian authorities which, in the view of the Polish president, amount to open glorification of formations responsible for the genocide of the Polish civilian population in Volhynia and Eastern Lesser Poland.
Official justification
In his address, President Nawrocki stressed that naming Ukrainian military units after the „Heroes of the UPA” and other forms of commemorating Stepan Bandera and his people are incompatible with Poland’s raison d’\u00e9tat and with respect for the victims of the Volhynia massacre.
„We cannot honour those who glorify the murderers of Polish women and children. The Order of the White Eagle is the highest state decoration, and it should be awarded to people who respect historical truth and the memory of the victims” – the president emphasised.
Nawrocki noted that Poland has supported Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression from the outset, but that this does not mean acquiescing to the falsification of history or the building of Ukrainian national identity on symbols tied to crimes against Poles.
Context of the decision
The Order of the White Eagle was conferred on Volodymyr Zelensky in 2022 by President Andrzej Duda as a gesture of solidarity after the outbreak of the full-scale war. Four years later, in the face of the systematic glorification of the UPA by the Ukrainian authorities, President Nawrocki concluded that maintaining this decoration would no longer be defensible.
President Nawrocki’s decision is one of the sharpest in Polish-Ukrainian relations since the start of the war and signals a shift in the tone of Polish historical diplomacy towards Kyiv.
Source: Prezydent.pl
