Poland stripped Zelenskyy’s White Eagle over a UPA decree—but kept Mussolini’s

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy returned Poland’s highest honor to Warsaw, and the office of Polish President Karol Nawrocki confirmed that it had arrived on 22 June. The returned Order of the White Eagle will now be placed in a sealed archive, where it will be kept but never awarded to anyone again.

The handover turns a one-sided snub into a mutual rupture between two wartime allies, and a lasting one. Poland is Ukraine’s lifeline — Rzeszów remains the main hub for Western arms, and Warsaw shapes Kyiv’s path into the EU — so a rift between them serves only Moscow. Euromaidan Press traced the deeper feud as it spilled into Warsaw’s streets.

A Ukrainian was among the White Eagle’s first recipients

The strip is striking partly because Poland almost never does it. Nawrocki’s chancellery acknowledged that the order still sits on the records of Catherine II — who helped wipe Poland off the map in the 18th-century partitions — alongside Benito Mussolini and former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Warsaw left the honor untouched on all three. Zelenskyy is the exception Nawrocki chose to make.

History adds an irony. Among the order’s first recipients after its founding in 1705 was the Ukrainian hetman Ivan Mazepa — a detail Radio Svoboda revisited under a headline joking that history keeps laughing at Nawrocki, wondering whether Mazepa himself might refuse the decoration today, in solidarity with the presidents handing theirs back.

What Warsaw will do with the medal

Nawrocki’s spokesman, Rafał Leśkiewicz, said on Polsat News that the insignia and its annulled certificate will go to the orders bureau’s deposit for permanent storage, with the dignity due to Poland’s highest distinction. The medal itself will never be handed to anyone else — a single retired piece rather than one passed on.

The act is not quite final. The formal order still needs the countersignature of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, whose government backs Ukraine’s EU accession. Leśkiewicz played down talk of escalation, pointing to Nawrocki’s line that the move targets a cult of history, not Ukrainians, and that Russia remains the enemy of Ukraine and a free Europe.

Ukraine’s leaders give back their Polish honors

The return of awards has run both ways. On 20 June, Ukraine’s second, third, and fifth presidents — Leonid Kuchma, Viktor Yushchenko, and Petro Poroshenko — renounced their own White Eagles. Within days the wave reached serving officials: Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha, presidential-office head Kyrylo Budanov, his deputy Ihor Zhovkva, ambassador to Warsaw Vasyl Bodnar, and former prime minister Volodymyr Groysman.

Sybiha gave the sharpest answer. Sybiha warned Kyiv would “mirror all steps, especially if those steps are unfriendly and disrespectful towards our country,” called Nawrocki a destroyer of recent progress, and said it was no coincidence he drew “applause from Moscow.” Even so, he stressed that Ukraine still valued the partnership and remained open to dialogue.

Zelenskyy invokes Orbán — Nawrocki denies it

Zelenskyy argued that Nawrocki was doing what Viktor Orbán has done — stoking the memory conflict as election-season theater — and warned it would end badly.

Nawrocki rejects the reading. His office says the decision had nothing to do with Poland’s internal contest, and answered Zelenskyy’s 26 May decree naming a special-forces unit for the Heroes of the UPA — the insurgent army Warsaw blames for killing up to 100,000 Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia between 1943 and 1945, killings its parliament has declared a genocide.

What the rupture costs both sides

The medals are symbolic; the dependencies underneath them are not. Tusk warned the standoff was “a strategic mistake that will cost both sides: in business, geopolitically, and reputationally,” and said he was working with European partners to lower the temperature.

Ukraine’s western border is its lifeline for aid and trade, and Polish farmers have blocked it before, blockading the crossings for months and holding up even humanitarian convoys. Alienating Warsaw puts that artery — and the EU path that runs through it — back at risk.

Poland carries its own exposure. Warsaw has made Ukraine’s reconstruction a national economic strategy, and analysts warn the feud risks turning it from a decision-maker into a petitioner, sidelined from the rebuild it has bet on and from the forums shaping Europe’s security. The row lands days before Poland hosts the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Gdańsk on 25–26 June — an event Nawrocki will not attend.

For now, the lifelines hold. Rzeszów stays open, the trains still run, and Polish and Ukrainian forensic teams continue working together on the Volhynia graves. What is left undone is the smallest thing of all — a single decree, still waiting on the countersignature of a prime minister who would rather see Kyiv reach Brussels.