Polish President Karol Nawrocki has ordered the withdrawal of the Order of the White Eagle from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The award, granted to him in 2023, is Poland’s highest state decoration. The decision was announced by the Polish presidential office.
The move followed a decree signed by Zelensky on May 26 giving the Separate Special Operations Center “North” of Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces the honorary title “Heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)”.
Nawrocki said that for most of Polish society, the UPA remains above all a formation responsible for brutal crimes against Polish citizens during World War II. He stated that, in the Polish view, at least 100,000 Polish citizens were killed by the UPA solely because they were Poles, Jews, or members of other minorities, and that assigning such a name to a Ukrainian military unit therefore goes far beyond Ukraine’s internal affairs.
At the same time, the Polish president stressed that the withdrawal of the award was not directed against the Ukrainian people and did not signal any change in Warsaw’s policy: Poland, he said, continues to support Ukraine in its war with Russia.
After the report was updated, it said that Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha had announced he would return his own Polish state award in response to Zelensky being stripped of the decoration.
Nawrocki is a professional historian. Before being elected president of Poland in 2025, he headed the Institute of National Remembrance, which researches crimes committed by the Nazi and communist regimes in Poland. After his election, he said that Ukraine and Poland needed to resolve “long-overdue historical issues.”
Nawrocki had first publicly proposed stripping Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle in late May, when the dispute over the UPA escalated. In early June, RBC-Ukraine reported that Kyrylo Budanov, head of the Ukrainian president’s office, had allegedly managed to prevent the “worst-case scenario” in the conflict, without clarifying what that meant beyond saying the matter involved issues more serious than awards.