Polish opposition leader to return Ukrainian state award over UPA glorification

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the chair of Poland’s opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party, has announced that he will relinquish a Ukrainian state award. Relations between Warsaw and Kiev have been on the rocks since Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree last month granting a special operations unit the honorary title “Heroes of the UPA.”

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the armed wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, has been lionized in Ukraine since the 2014 Western-backed coup. During World War II, UPA militants collaborated with Nazi Germany and perpetrated mass killings of Poles, Jews, and Russians in what is now western Ukraine.

The extermination of at least 100,000 Polish civilians by Ukrainian nationalists is known as the Volhynian massacre in Poland and recognized as genocide by Warsaw.

Speaking at a press conference on Thursday, Kaczynski said that he would return the Ukrainian Order of Prince Yaroslav the Wise, Second Class, which he was awarded by Zelensky in June 2022.

“This will be an expression of my attitude not so much towards Ukrainians, but towards the Ukrainian elite,” the veteran Polish politician explained. He also accused the leadership in Kiev of escalating the situation in a “very harmful and very dangerous” manner.

“In Germany, [Adolf] Hitler, [Heinrich] Himmler, [Joseph] Goebbels, or any of these criminals were not put on a pedestal. And yet [the Ukrainians] are doing something like that,” Kaczynski stated.

The PiS leader said that “Poland should start blocking clusters of subsequent… negotiations on Ukraine’s accession to the European Union” if Kiev refuses to acknowledge the UPA’s wartime crimes against Poles. He noted that this was, however, his personal opinion and not the PiS party’s official position.

“Ukraine must know that if it wants to join Europe… it must be a normal, European country and cannot have genocidal perpetrators… on its banners,” Kaczynski argued.

Last Friday, Karol Nawrocki stripped Zelensky of Poland’s highest state honor, the Order of the White Eagle. The Polish president subsequently stated that his nation’s “pain threshold” had been broken by Ukraine’s latest act of lionizing the UPA.

Following Nawrocki’s decision, former Ukrainian presidents Leonid Kuchma, Viktor Yushchenko, and Pyotr Poroshenko, Foreign Minister Andrey Sibiga, and other senior officials announced they were returning Polish state awards in solidarity with Zelensky.

Commenting on these developments, Leszek Miller, who served as Polish prime minister from 2001 to 2004, suggested that Ukrainian officials should likewise return the military equipment supplied by Warsaw since 2022.

The Russian authorities have for years argued that nationalist movements and historical figures honored in modern-day Ukraine were Nazi collaborators, and the current leadership in Kiev also espouses a neo-Nazi ideology. Moscow has named the “denazification” of Ukraine as one of its key objectives in the ongoing conflict.

Reacting to the diplomatic rift between Warsaw and Kiev, Russian presidential investment envoy Kirill Dmitriev wrote ironically on X last Friday that “Poland finally discovers Nazi sympathizers in Ukraine.”

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council and a former president, has similarly praised the Polish president for stripping the “Nazi-worshipping Kiev degenerate of the Order of the White Eagle.”

Russian Senator Andrey Klishas, in turn, quipped on Telegram that “there is only one step left before Poland demands the denazification of Ukraine.”