Zelensky's decree named a Special Operations Forces unit after the UPA. Now Warsaw is weighing whether to strip him of the Order of the White Eagle. The cost of Ukraine's deferred memory work is coming due.
When President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree late last month naming a Ukrainian Special Operations Forces unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, he meant it as a tribute. In Warsaw, it read as an indictment. The unit's new title, "Heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army," carried the red-and-black flag into a generation of soldiers who have only known one war. For many Ukrainians, the UPA is the independence army that fought the Soviet Red Army, Nazi Germany, and Polish rule. For Poland, the same organization carried out ethnic cleansing of Polish civilians in Volhynia and eastern Galicia in 1943 to 1945, a campaign that researchers have estimated killed roughly 100,000 people. The dispute, according to BBC News, is now a constitutional one in Poland: President Karol Nawrocki has opened the process to revoke the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest state honour, that was bestowed on Zelensky in 2023 by then-President Andrzej Duda.
The Order of the White Eagle fight is the visible fight. Underneath sits a structural question: how Ukraine reconciles its independence-memory with the victim-memory of an ally it cannot afford to lose.
Both memories of the UPA are real, and that is the entire problem. The UPA was formed in 1942 and fought, with shifting tactics and shifting allegiances, against the Soviet and Nazi occupations of western Ukraine. The Polish underground and the UPA also fought each other, and the Volhynia campaign, in which UPA units massacred Polish villagers and forced survivors to flee, sits in Polish national memory as one of the twentieth century's worst ethnic cleansings. In Ukrainian memory, the UPA is the armed wing of a national liberation struggle, and the red-and-black flag has reappeared on the uniforms and insignia of frontline units that have fought Russia in a war that began in 2014. Zelensky's decree did not invent that history. It gave it a uniform.
Polish politics have closed ranks on what to do about it. Nawrocki called the decree "glorification of bandits and killers" and said it shows "Ukraine is not ready to join the European family." Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who has tried to keep the Polish-Ukrainian relationship intact, told Kyiv that solutions had to be found: "if not, it will mean that not empathy but hard business will determine our relations." Tusk has since conceded that "diplomacy has yielded no results." The cross-party reach is the news. The opposition Law and Justice party, normally the more Ukraine-skeptical side of Polish politics, has called for "a drastic reassessment of relations." The far-right Confederation, according to the BBC, has gone further: its leader Krzysztof Bosak wants Warsaw to stop funding Starlink satellite services for Ukraine's army and to block Ukraine's European Union accession until Kyiv reverses the decree. Volhynia is not a fringe issue in Poland. It is a national one.
Kyiv has not offered a road map out. Zelensky's chief of staff, Kyrylo Budanov, travelled to Warsaw last weekend in an attempt to ease tensions. The visit did not stop Nawrocki from convening the council of the Order of the White Eagle to weigh revocation. Zelensky this week flew to the United Kingdom via Moldova rather than through the Polish hub at Rzeszów that he normally uses for foreign trips. Tusk said the airport is "not closed" to him. The Ukrainian foreign ministry stressed that Kyiv had no intention to cause offence. None of that has changed the underlying Polish demand: choose what kind of past the Ukrainian state is going to honour out loud.
The structural stakes are unusually concrete. Poland shelters close to a million Ukrainian refugees, has been a frontline arms supplier and political backer of Kyiv, and is a gateway to Ukraine's EU accession. A Ukraine reconstruction conference is scheduled for later this month in Gdańsk, and Poland's foreign minister has indicated Zelensky may choose not to attend. Analysts quoted by the BBC warn that stripping the Order of the White Eagle, which is legally possible if the holder is deemed to have "committed an act making them unworthy" of the honour, could trigger a major diplomatic rupture and strengthen the Polish right at a moment when Russian President Vladimir Putin is counting on exactly that outcome. The red-and-black flag and the Polish vote on Ukraine's future are now, awkwardly, in the same room.
The honest reading is that Ukraine's independence-memory narrative, the UPA, Stepan Bandera, the struggle against Soviet rule, has a real constituency and a real claim. So does the Polish victim-memory of Volhynia, which is not negotiable as a partisan talking point and is the reason the row has crossed the Polish political spectrum so quickly. The reconciliation work that would let Kyiv keep the UPA in its independence pantheon without breaking the alliance with Warsaw is not a press release. It is monument policy. It is school curricula. It is joint commemoration with Poland. It is an official Ukrainian acknowledgment of the Polish dead in Volhynia that has, for three decades, never quite come. So far, none of that is on the table. Tusk's appeal to both sides for "a direct and honest conversation" is the right diagnosis: "co-operation serves the interest of both our states and nations, while conflict serves Moscow's interests." It is not yet a programme.
What to watch: whether Nawrocki follows through on the revocation process, which would harden the Polish right's position for years; whether the Gdańsk reconstruction conference happens with or without a Ukrainian head of state; and whether Kyiv, under the pressure of losing the key EU member state for its war effort, finally does the memory work it has put off since 1991. The unit name was the spark. The fuel is older.