Why Poland's president stripped Zelenskyy of the White Eagle
A decision on 19 June 2026 placed a dispute over wartime memory at the centre of Polish–Ukrainian relations.
What did it mean when Poland's president withdrew the country's highest honour from his Ukrainian counterpart on 19 June 2026? Polish president Karol Nawrocki stripped Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy of the Order of the White Eagle, the highest state decoration in Poland.
The stated trigger was a decision by Zelenskyy to confer the honorary title "Heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army" on a special forces unit. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army was an organisation that carried out mass killings of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. As reported at the time, the Polish move was a direct response to that naming.
A question of memory
The episode shows how a symbolic act in one capital can bring a swift and equally symbolic response in another. The honour was Poland's to give and to take away, and its withdrawal put the matter of wartime history openly on the bilateral agenda.
The wider backdrop
The decision came a day after sharp exchanges over the war. On 18 June 2026, following an attack on Moscow, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said Russia's armed forces would from then on carry out "massive group strikes" on a "regular basis", and Russia spoke of a "massive retaliation" against Ukraine. Zelenskyy, for his part, warned that if Ukraine burned, Moscow would burn too.
Those statements concerned the battlefield, while the Polish decision concerned history and honours. Taken together, they meant that on 19 June 2026 Kyiv faced renewed threats from Russia and a public rebuke from the president of a neighbouring country.
