Why Poland's president stripped Zelenskyy of an honour

What prompted Poland's president to take back the country's highest honour from his Ukrainian counterpart? On 19 June 2026, Karol Nawrocki stripped Volodymyr Zelenskyy of the Order of the White Eagle, the highest state award in Poland.

The trigger was a decision by Zelenskyy to confer the honorary title "Heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army" on a special forces unit. As reported at the time, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army was the organisation that carried out mass killings of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia during World War II. Nawrocki's response was to withdraw the award.

A dispute over memory

The episode placed the legacy of the wartime killings at the centre of relations between Warsaw and Kyiv. The naming of a military unit after the insurgent army was the specific act that Poland's president cited as grounds for the withdrawal. The step targeted Zelenskyy personally, by removing a distinction he held, rather than being framed as a measure against the Ukrainian state.

The wider backdrop

The decision came a day after sharp escalation in the war. On 18 June 2026, following an attack on Moscow, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said Russia's armed forces would from then on carry out "massive group strikes" on a "regular basis", and Russia announced a "massive retaliation" against Ukraine. Zelenskyy, for his part, warned that if Ukraine burned, Moscow would burn too.

So within two days Ukraine's president faced both a promised intensification of Russian strikes and a public rebuke from the leader of a neighbouring country. The two matters are separate: one concerns the conduct of the war, the other a long-contested chapter of shared history. Taken together, they show that the diplomatic ground around Kyiv was under strain on more than one front in the second half of June 2026.