WARSAW, June 8 (Reuters) – Poland is weighing whether to strip Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of its top honour for renaming an army unit after Ukrainian nationalist insurgents who massacred Poles in World War Two.<\/p>\n
The decision \u200ccaused a chorus of outrage in Warsaw and led President Karol Nawrocki to call for Zelenskiy to be stripped \u200cof the Order of the White Eagle, which he was awarded in 2023.<\/p>\n
Here’s how Poland’s and Ukraine’s rival interpretations of their complex, shared 20th-century history weigh \u200bon current relations:<\/p>\n
UKRAINIAN INSURGENT ARMY<\/p>\n
Zelenskiy signed a decree recognising a Ukrainian combat unit’s contribution to the fight against Russia by naming it after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).<\/p>\n
During and after World War Two, when Ukraine belonged to the Soviet Union, the UPA fought against the Red Army, for a time allying itself with the Nazi German invaders, to seek Ukrainian independence.<\/p>\n
Ukraine says the naming of the unit \u200ccarries no “anti-Polish intent” and was chosen by \u2060soldiers who wanted to commemorate others who had fought against Moscow.<\/p>\n
But the UPA was also involved in the Volhynia massacres carried out by Ukrainian nationalists from 1943 to 1945, in which Warsaw says \u2060around 100,000 ethnic Poles were killed. Thousands of Ukrainians also died in reprisal killings.<\/p>\n
Polish historians view the massacres as a genocide intended to prevent a post-war Polish state claiming sovereignty over Ukrainian-majority areas that had been part of Poland between the two world wars.<\/p>\n
Kyiv rejects the \u200bterm, \u200bsaying that thousands of Ukrainians were also killed in what was a \u200bcomplex conflict.<\/p>\n
The events have been a bone of \u200ccontention for decades, even as Poland has strongly backed Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion, taking in almost a million refugees and supplying weapons.<\/p>\n
In 1947, within new borders after World War Two, Poland forcibly relocated some 140,000 ethnic Ukrainians and people identifying as members of the small Lemko ethnic group from southeastern Poland to territories it had regained from Germany. The aim was to cut support for underground UPA groups in Poland, but the Ukrainian side considers it a crime of ethnic cleansing.<\/p>\n
DEMANDS FOR \u200cEXHUMATIONS IN UKRAINESuccessive Polish governments have, with limited success, demanded access to \u200bthe sites in western Ukraine that were once part of Poland where \u200bUPA massacres took place.<\/p>\n
However, last year Poland began exhuming \u200bthe remains of Poles killed in the former Polish village of Puzhnyky and, last week, Kyiv gave \u200cpermission for more exhumations in Volhynia’s Liuboml district.<\/p>\n
NATIONALIST PRESIDENT \u200bNAWROCKI<\/p>\n
Nawrocki, a conservative nationalist historian \u200binspired by U.S. President Donald Trump, has repeatedly accused Kyiv of stalling on requests for exhumations, and urged it to denounce the Volhynia massacre as genocide.<\/p>\n
Nawrocki has tapped into weariness with the large number of Ukrainians in Poland and, \u200bduring his campaign, vowed not to ratify \u200cany Ukrainian accession to NATO to avoid provoking Russia, departing from previous Polish policy and angering Kyiv.<\/p>\n
Critics have \u200baccused Nawrocki of promoting an approach to history teaching that whitewashes difficult parts of Poland’s past.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by \u200bMarek Strzelecki; additional reporting by Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk; Editing by Kevin Liffey)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WARSAW, June 8 (Reuters) – Poland is weighing whether to strip Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of its top…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10988,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[419,9,127,7322,7323,1508,7303,8150,8216],"class_list":["post-10987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-poland","tag-karol-nawrocki","tag-poland","tag-ukraine","tag-ukrainian-insurgent-army","tag-ukrainian-president","tag-ukrainians-in-poland","tag-volodymyr-zelenskiy","tag-western-ukraine","tag-world-war-two"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}