Former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko said he is giving up Poland’s Order of the White Eagle after Polish President Karol Nawrocki decided to strip Volodymyr Zelensky of the same award.
“In both Zelensky’s case and mine, the award was given not to heads of state but to Ukrainians, to our soldiers defending Ukraine, Poland, and all of Europe. That is why I have decided to renounce the Order of the White Eagle,” Poroshenko said.
He added that two weeks earlier he had promised colleagues at a council of parliamentary faction leaders that he would take this step if they failed to persuade Nawrocki not to make what he called a mistaken decision. According to Poroshenko, those efforts failed.
The former president also described the Polish leader’s move as “mistaken and unfair toward the Ukrainian people.” He stressed that his refusal of the award is not directed at the Polish public. Poroshenko also wrote that the Kremlin welcomes anything that weakens unity between Ukraine and Poland.
Explaining why Zelensky’s decoration was revoked, Nawrocki said the Polish people have a “pain threshold,” and that it had been crossed after one of Ukraine’s military units was given the name “Heroes of the UPA”.
On May 26, Zelensky signed a decree granting the honorary title “Heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army” to the Separate Special Operations Center “North” of Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces. In Poland, the move drew sharp criticism because of the role of UPA fighters in the Volhynia massacres of 1943–1944, in which, by various estimates, 30,000 to 60,000 Poles and 20,000 to 30,000 Ukrainians were killed.
Nawrocki proposed stripping Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state decoration, which the Ukrainian president had previously received from Andrzej Duda. After losing the award, Zelensky sent the order back to Poland by mail. Ukraine’s second president Leonid Kuchma and third president Viktor Yushchenko later renounced the same decoration as well.