WARSAW — Poland and Ukraine have a common enemy — Russia — but a dispute over massacres eight decades ago is increasingly being weaponized in domestic politics on both sides.
The historical feud began in May when Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy named a Ukrainian military unit after the “Heroes of UPA,” which outraged Poland. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, known as UPA, killed tens of thousands of Poles in World War II in an ethnic cleansing campaign in what is now western Ukraine.
On the Polish side, the heated debate about Zelenskyy’s move is already threatening to weigh on next year’s crucial general election — with the nationalist camp seeing an opportunity to score points against pro-EU centrists.
To Ukrainians, the same dispute is turning into a defining red line of whether outsiders can dictate their national heroes, and has become politically important to Zelenskyy. Russia is waging war while portraying Ukraine as an artificial state, so Kyiv is defending its own nationalist symbols.
“No one else will ever dictate to Ukrainians which heroes to honor, which holidays to celebrate, or which history to study,” Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Zelenskyy’s office, said this weekend.
For Poland, the UPA’s massacres were genocide. For Ukraine, the UPA were freedom fighters who battled the Soviets during and after World War II and whose legacy now provides inspiration in the fight against Russia.
Poland’s nationalist President Karol Nawrocki retaliated by stripping Zelenskyy of Poland’s highest honor: the Order of the White Eagle.
Zelenskyy promptly packed the medal in a box and sent it back to Warsaw. He also skipped a major conference last week on Ukrainian recovery and reconstruction in the northern Polish city of Gdańsk.
For the pro-EU coalition government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, this potential souring of one of the war’s most important alliances is a painful diversion from the priority: the joint front against the Kremlin. But knowing the widespread sensitivities at home, he is being careful to call for politicians on both sides to cool tensions, accusing both of making a “strategic mistake” in the historical fight.
Tusk is up for reelection next year, and the big question is whether his coalition will be replaced by the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party — aligned with President Nawrocki — possibly in tandem with the anti-Ukrainian extreme right.
That makes Ukraine, and the estimated 2 million Ukrainians in Poland — about 1 million of whom arrived after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 — a defining campaign issue. Frustration is growing about the perceived strains that refugees place on public services, and right-wingers see their moment to strike.
A man holds a promotional books prior to a campaign rally of Karol Nawrocki, candidate for the 2025 Polish presidential election supported by Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party. | Sergei Papon/AFP via Getty ImagesWhile Tusk’s government is hostile to Nawrocki, it has limited social care for Ukrainians, including for the elderly and small children.
Playing politics
Zelenskyy told Ukrainian media that Nawrocki’s revocation of the Order of the White Eagle was closely bound up with Polish domestic politics.
“They have an election in 2027. We have no business here, this is their internal matter,” Zelenskyy said.
But Nawrocki rejected accusations he was playing politics.
“Dear Volodymyr, Mr President, the dispute does not concern Poland’s domestic issues at all. There are no such issues, because all Poles know and understand how much evil Ukrainian nationalists did to Poland, to Polish women, Polish men and Polish children,” he responded.
Nawrocki — whose central presidential campaign message last year was “Poland first! Poles first!” — also warned Warsaw could block Ukraine’s path to joining the EU unless Kyiv acknowledges the massacres and apologizes.
Such threats are a major reversal for two countries that have striven to work together for decades on trying to overcome their difficult history, with leaders from both countries opening monuments to the wartime massacres, and Kyiv recently agreeing to allow the exhumation and reburial of victims of UPA.
Arkadiusz Mularczyk, a member of the European Parliament with PiS, had no doubt about who was to blame.
“The political class in Poland — and I think all political forces in Poland — know who Zelenskyy is now. They know how Ukrainians operate, that this is still a post-Soviet country, with a post-Soviet mentality, where methods and diplomacy do not work, but rather, I would say, force and arrogance,” he told POLITICO.
But Renata Mieńkowska-Norkiene, a political scientist at Warsaw University, said the UPA dispute is deeply rooted in Polish politics.
“The president has recognized the public mood has shifted more against Ukraine and the Ukrainians and concluded he wasn’t really risking anything,” she said. “The spat over history allows him to consolidate right-wing and nationalist circles around himself and around his decision and that will be important in the run-up to the election.”
Poland sours on Ukrainians
After an early outburst of solidarity following Russia’s full-scale invasion, Poland’s mood has changed.
A woman holds a banner reading “Freedom” as she takes part in rally in support of Ukraine to mark 4th anniversary of the Russian full scale invasion on Ukraine in Warsaw’s Old Town. | Wojtek Radwanski/AFP via Getty Images“We understand that Ukraine is at war and we want Ukraine to win this war against Russia, but we cannot allow Poland and Poles to be so disrespected,” said Rafał Bochenek, an MP and a PiS spokesperson.
Since winning the presidency last year, Nawrocki has pushed the PiS camp further right, often making common cause with two far-right parties — the libertarian Confederation and the antisemitic Confederation of the Polish Crown, both of which have espoused strongly anti-Ukrainian views.
“Unconditional aid and funding from the government in Kyiv, as well as putting the Polish state into debt in order to finance the corrupt government in Kyiv, are absolutely harmful and irrational,” Confederation leader Krzysztof Bosak said on Monday.
Grzegorz Braun, the leader of the Confederation of the Polish Crown and a member of the European Parliament who doused the candles in a Hanukkah menorah in the Polish parliament with a fire extinguisher, this week called for an end to military aid to Ukraine.
“The Kyiv regime is neither an ally nor a friend. It is an enemy of the Polish nation and the Polish state,” he said at a rally commemorating the wartime massacres.
Those views are now increasingly common in Poland.
A focus group study by state-run pollster CBOS showed this week that Poles are interested in policies favoring them over Ukrainians, whom respondents said “abuse their rights in Poland.”
Social help for Ukrainians in Poland is an increasingly touchy issue, even as economic research shows that Poland has gained from the influx of working-age Ukrainians.
An SW Research poll earlier this month showed 51.9 percent of respondents said their view of Ukraine and Zelenskyy had worsened after Zelenskyy’s decision on the UPA military unit.
Polish social media has been consumed by a video of a Ukrainian convenience store clerk being harassed and insulted by a Polish customer, who was later arrested. The issue became a huge national story.
PiS keeps attacking Tusk and the government for being too soft on Ukraine. The party is also pledging a harder line on Kyiv if it returns to power next year.
“Polish society is being cured of a certain idealism, the idea that something can be built with Ukraine on the basis of partnership. We can see that this is not possible. So it should be only hard, pragmatic interests from now on,” said Mularczyk, the MEP.
Tempers are also fraying in Kyiv.
Zelenskyy this week announced the creation of a national pantheon to honor Ukraine’s heroes. Part of the message sounded as if it were aimed at Warsaw.
“The names of all the heroes who, throughout the centuries and eras, fought for Ukraine and inspired Ukraine will be united and forever inscribed in our history … no one will ever tell us how to live, how to speak, whom to love, whom to be grateful to, or which heroes to honor,” Zelenskyy said.
Budanov called the fight between Warsaw and Kyiv “a serious mistake,” but warned that “there will be more to come, as they say, if everyone doesn’t slow down a bit.”
Tadeusz Iwański, head of the Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova desk at the state-run Eastern Studies Center think tank, said narrowing the gap between the Polish and Ukrainian perspectives will be extremely difficult.
“Zelenskyy has withstood enormous Russian pressure, and enormous pressure from Trump, who tried to break him and force him into various concessions. So this pressure from Poland — for him to move on the UPA — barely registers by comparison,” Iwański told POLITICO.
[Image text:] POLSKA Karol