Polish president wants Zelensky stripped of top state honor
Vladimir Zelenksy’s decision to name a commando unit after Ukrainian Nazi collaborators is evidence that his country is “not ready to become part of the European family,” Polish President Karol Nawrocki has said.
Under a decree signed on Tuesday, Zelensky granted the title ‘Heroes of the UPA’ – the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the armed wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) – to the Special Operations Center North, saying the move is aimed at reviving the “historic traditions of the national army.”
Speaking to reporters on Friday, Nawrocki condemned the move as an attempt to rehabilitate figures responsible for wartime atrocities, saying Warsaw cannot remain indifferent to the glorification of the UPA. He also called for Zelensky to be stripped of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state decoration.
“Zelensky has shown that Ukraine, through its glorification of bandits and murderers from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, is not ready to become part of the European family,” he said.
The move has drawn widespread criticism. Former Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller called Zelensky’s decision “a spit in the face of Poles.”
Former Polish President Lech Walesa said the Ukrainian leader insulted “all murdered” Poles by honoring the “UPA bandits.” Walesa withdrew his support for Zelensky following the state reburial of OUN leader Andrey Melnik in Kiev on Sunday, saying: “In response, I have publicly removed the Ukrainian flag from my chest.”
Ukrainian nationalists killed an estimated 100,000 Polish civilians in what is now western Ukraine from 1943-44. The massacres remain a major source of tension between Warsaw and Kiev.
The OUN sought to establish an ethnically homogeneous Ukrainian state and collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II. Melnik, who co-founded the movement in 1929 and led it from 1938, oversaw espionage and sabotage operations for Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry condemned the decision to honor Melnik, saying there is “no place for ignoring historical truth and the memory of the victims murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.”
Slovak MEP Lubos Blaha called Zelensky’s move “an open admission of fascism.” Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev accused Zelensky of kneeling before “Nazi scum,” and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated that honoring a Nazi collaborator exposes the Kiev regime’s “true essence.”
