KYIV, June 20 (Reuters) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Saturday he had returned a state decoration a day after Poland ‘s president said he had stripped him of the award in connection \u200cwith a dispute over events in World War Two.<\/p>\n
Polish President Karol Karol Nawrocki said on Friday he \u200chad revoked the medal awarded to Zelenskiy in 2023 after the Ukrainian president renamed a military unit in honour of World War Two-era \u200bUkrainian insurgents accused of massacring Poles.<\/p>\n
The row over the role of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) threatens to deepen a diplomatic rift between the close strategic partners as Kyiv rallies allies to push Russia to end its war on Ukraine.<\/p>\n
“We believed that the Order of the White Eagle, awarded in 2023, was meant for the Ukrainian People and our army. That \u200cis what was said at the \u2060time,” Zelenskiy wrote on X. “Today, I sent the Order back to the President of Poland.”<\/p>\n
Zelenskiy posted a photo of the decoration being packed in a box and being sent to \u2060the Polish president’s office.<\/p>\n
He said Ukraine was grateful for Poland’s support and pledged Kyiv would “remain open to all meaningful formats of engagement with Poland in order to try to avoid conflicting interpretations of the difficult and painful chapters of our shared \u200bpast”.<\/p>\n
Zelenskiy’s chief \u200bof staff, Kyrylo Budanov, said he was renouncing the Golden \u200bOfficer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of \u200cthe Republic of Poland, awarded to him last year, to protest against a move he described as “a gift” for Russia.<\/p>\n
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha had earlier called Nawrocki’s decision a “strategic error” and said no president of a foreign country “is going to dictate our history to us”.<\/p>\n
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, an opponent of Nawrocki, urged both leaders to remain calm.<\/p>\n
In announcing his decision to revoke the award to the Ukrainian president, Nawrocki said the move was “not directed \u200cagainst the Ukrainian people. It does not signify a change in \u200bthe strategic direction of Polish security policy.”<\/p>\n
Warsaw is a strong supporter \u200bof Kyiv in the more than four-year-old conflict \u200bwith Russia. But public sentiment towards Ukraine has become more negative in recent years due \u200cto weariness with large numbers of refugees, disputes \u200bover grain imports and the \u200blegacy of the World War Two massacres.<\/p>\n
Some Ukrainians regard the UPA as heroes for the resistance they mounted against both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and as symbols of Kyiv’s struggle for independence from \u200bMoscow.<\/p>\n
But the UPA was also involved \u200cin the Volhynia massacres, a series of killings from 1943 to 1945 in which Poland says around \u200b100,000 Poles were killed by Ukrainian nationalists. Thousands of Ukrainians also died in reprisal killings.<\/p>\n
(Reporting \u200bby Ron Popeski and Dan Peleschuk, Editing by Franklin Paul)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"KYIV, June 20 (Reuters) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Saturday he had returned a state decoration…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13088,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[419,2449,9,6697,9331,127,7322,9326,7323,7303,8216],"class_list":["post-13087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-poland","tag-karol-nawrocki","tag-kyiv","tag-poland","tag-polish-president","tag-state-decoration","tag-ukraine","tag-ukrainian-insurgent-army","tag-ukrainian-people","tag-ukrainian-president","tag-volodymyr-zelenskiy","tag-world-war-two"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13087","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=13087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}