Polish leaders on Friday warned that the Ukrainian president\u2019s move to honour a controversial World War II group accused of massacring Poles risked souring relations between the two neighbours.<\/p>\n
The row was sparked after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky named a military unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).<\/p>\n
Polish President Karol Nawrocki told the media on Friday he was \u201coutraged\u201d by the move and had proposed \u201cthe withdrawal of the Order of the White Eagle from President Zelensky\u201d.<\/p>\n
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the move \u201cwounds our historical sensitivity\u201d and is \u201cworrying from the point of view of our relations\u201d.<\/p>\n
Poland has been Ukraine\u2019s key ally in Europe following Russia\u2019s invasion in February 2022, but the two countries share a tortured history during World War II.<\/p>\n
The UPA killed some 100,000 Polish civilians in what is now western Ukraine, according to Warsaw, which considers the killings a genocide.<\/p>\n
Ukrainian nationalists, though, revere the UPA for fighting for an independent Ukrainian state against Soviet forces \u2014 despite the group\u2019s ties with Nazi Germany.<\/p>\n
With the war now in its fifth year, Ukraine has been seeking to unify the country in its fight against the Russian invasion around some historical figures.<\/p>\n
Earlier this week, Kyiv repatriated the remains of a leader of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (ONU), the umbrella group that established the UPA military unit and that challenged Soviet rule including by working with the Nazis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Polish leaders on Friday warned that the Ukrainian president\u2019s move to honour a controversial World War II group…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9440,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[704,7298,9],"class_list":["post-9439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-poland","tag-international","tag-mna","tag-poland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9439","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=9439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9439\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}