In short: On 19 June 2026, Poland’s President Karol Nawrocki withdrew his country’s highest state honour, the Order of the White Eagle, from Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. The trigger was a dispute about how the Second World War is remembered. Zelensky returned the decoration by post. A medal is a small object — but the argument around it touches history, identity, and the unity of Europe at a moment when both Poland and Ukraine are under pressure from the same direction.
What happened
In 2023, the then Polish president, Andrzej Duda, awarded Volodymyr Zelensky the Order of the White Eagle — Poland’s oldest and highest state decoration, given for outstanding service to the country. At the time, Poland was one of Ukraine’s strongest backers after Russia’s full-scale invasion, and the award honoured Zelensky’s wartime leadership.
Three years later, the picture changed. On 19 June 2026, Poland’s new president, Karol Nawrocki, announced in a video address that he was revoking the honour. The reason he gave was a decision taken in Kyiv: on 26 May 2026, Zelensky had signed a decree naming a unit of Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces in tribute to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) — a wartime partisan force whose legacy Poland and Ukraine remember in sharply different ways.
Ukraine’s response was pointed. Zelensky returned the decoration to Warsaw by mail, sharing a photograph of the postal form addressed to the office of the Polish president. The gesture said, in effect: if you do not want us to hold it, here it is back.
Background: the honour, and the history behind the quarrel
The Order of the White Eagle dates back to 1705. Over three centuries it has been given to monarchs, heads of state, and figures a country wishes to honour. That long history is also where this story gains its sting — more on that below.
The deeper dispute is about the UPA and the region of Volhynia. During the Second World War, the UPA fought for an independent Ukraine against both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In 1943–1944, units associated with it carried out mass killings of Polish civilians in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, then part of Poland. Poland officially regards these killings as genocide; estimates of Polish victims run to around 100,000. For many Poles, the UPA is first and foremost the force responsible for those crimes.
For many Ukrainians, the same organisation is remembered differently — as fighters for national independence against far larger imperial powers. Both memories are sincerely held, and they collide directly. That collision is the real subject of the medal dispute. Nawrocki put the Polish view plainly, saying the UPA remains, for most Polish society, “a formation responsible for brutal crimes” against Polish citizens. He also stressed that the decision was “not directed against the Ukrainian people” and did not change Poland’s support for Ukraine’s security.
The argument the medal made famous
The revocation drew attention to who has held the Order of the White Eagle in the past — and never lost it. Three names came up repeatedly, and all three check out historically:
- Catherine II of Russia (“the Great”) received the order in 1787. Under her rule, Poland was carved up between its neighbours and erased from the map.
- Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist dictator, received it in 1923.
- Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor, received it in 2002. He later became closely tied to Russian state energy interests and remained associated with the Kremlin even after the 2022 invasion.
None of them was ever stripped of the honour. That is the point captured in the Instagram post by Marta Barandiy — founder of the NGO Promote Ukraine and a co-initiator of this Hub — that prompted this article. Her argument, in compressed form: a Russian empress who destroyed Poland, a fascist dictator, and a chancellor entangled with Moscow all “kept the honour,” while it was taken from a wartime Ukrainian president who is, right now, helping to hold the line in Europe’s east. “The pedestal is empty,” she wrote. “The historical absurdity remains.”
It is a sharp rhetorical contrast, and it lands. It is worth being precise about what it does and does not prove. The comparison highlights an inconsistency in how the honour has been treated across centuries. It does not, on its own, resolve the underlying disagreement about the UPA, which is a genuine historical wound for Poland rather than an invented grievance.
Why a medal matters more than it looks
Here is the part that reaches beyond two governments.
Symbols carry political weight. A state honour is not just metal and ribbon; it is a public statement about who a country admires. Giving it, and taking it back, both send messages — domestically and abroad. That is exactly why this story travelled across European media within hours.
Memory is contested ground, and that contest can be exploited. Poland and Ukraine are neighbours, fellow targets of Russian pressure, and partners whose cooperation matters for the whole European Union. Anything that drives a wedge between them serves a third party. Poland’s own government underlined this: Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the revocation “pleases Putin and shocks our allies,” and Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski had earlier warned against stripping the honour from someone “at war with Putin.” Whatever one thinks of the decision, the strategic risk is openly acknowledged inside Poland itself.
This is fertile soil for disinformation. Historical disputes between allies are a favourite tool of hostile information campaigns, because they are real, emotional, and easy to inflame. The comment thread under the original post — Poles and Ukrainians trading accusations over Volhynia and over present-day politics — is a small live example of how quickly a single decision becomes a battlefield of competing narratives. Knowing this does not make either side’s grief less real. It does mean readers should be cautious about content designed mainly to deepen the anger.
Why this matters for people living in the EU
For the roughly one million Ukrainians who have built lives in Poland, and the millions more across the Union, this is not an abstract diplomatic spat. Disputes between governments can shape the everyday atmosphere — at work, at school, in the queue at an office. As one Polish commenter under the original post argued, decisions taken at the top can put ordinary Ukrainian residents “in an awful position,” whatever their own views.
The healthier response is not to pick a team and shout, but to understand the story: a real historical wound on one side, a sense of injustice and bad timing on the other, and an outside power that benefits whenever the two are set against each other. Citizens who can hold all three of those facts at once are harder to manipulate. That is what democratic resilience looks like in practice — not agreement on everything, but the ability to disagree without being turned against one another.
Where Agora stands
This piece is a fact-first explainer, but Agora AI Hub holds a clear view, and we label it as such.
We think Marta Barandiy’s core point deserves to be heard: revoking a wartime ally’s highest honour, over a memory dispute, while that ally is still defending its existence — and Europe’s eastern edge with it — is a decision whose timing mainly helps the Kremlin. We also take seriously that the Volhynia killings are a genuine atrocity, and that Poland’s pain is not a propaganda invention. Both things are true at once.
Europe’s strength has never come from a single, tidy version of history. It comes from neighbours choosing partnership over old wounds, especially when a common adversary is actively trying to reopen them. A medal can be returned by post. Trust between two front-line democracies is far harder to send back — and far harder to rebuild.
Sources
- France 24 — “Poland strips Zelensky of highest honour, escalating World War II-era row” (19 June 2026): https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20260619-poland-strips-zelensky-of-highest-honour-escalating-world-war-ii-era-row
- The Washington Post — “Polish president strips Zelensky of honor after special forces unit’s renaming” (20 June 2026): https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/06/20/polish-president-strips-zelensky-honor-after-special-forces-units-renaming/
- Office of the President of Poland — “President Karol Nawrocki: I have decided to revoke the Order of the White Eagle from the President of Ukraine”: https://www.president.pl/news/president-karol-nawrocki-i-have-decided-to-revoke-the-order-of-the-white-eagle-from-the-president-of-ukraine,122167
- Bloomberg — “Poland’s President Moves to Strip Zelenskyy of Top Honor Over WWII Dispute” (19 June 2026): https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-19/polish-president-strips-zelenskyy-of-top-state-honor-amid-row
- PBS NewsHour — “Zelenskyy returns Poland’s highest honor after Polish leader revokes it in a spat over history”: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/zelenskyy-returns-polands-highest-honor-after-polish-leader-revokes-it-in-a-spat-over-history
- Al Jazeera — “Zelenskyy and top Ukrainian officials return Polish awards in WWII dispute” (20 June 2026): https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/6/20/top-ukrainian-officials-return-polish-awards-in-wwii-dispute
- LIGA.net — “Tusk reacts to the revocation of Zelenskyy’s Order: ‘This pleases Putin’”: https://news.liga.net/en/politics/news/this-pleases-putin-and-shocks-allies-tusk-reacts-to-the-revocation-of-zelenskyys-order
- Order of the White Eagle (Poland) — historical recipients, incl. Catherine II, Mussolini, Schröder — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_White_Eagle_(Poland)
- Original Instagram post by Marta Barandiy (@martabarandiy), 21 June 2026: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZ2ioybAnrj/
