Geopolitics doesn't care about your feelings, but history absolutely does. For the past few years, Warsaw and Kyiv have presented a unified front to the world, bound by the shared threat of Russian aggression. Poland became Ukraine’s logistics hub, its loudest cheerleader in Europe, and the temporary home to millions of its refugees. On paper, they’re inseparable allies. In reality, a brutal 80-year-old blood feud is threatening to tear the relationship apart from the inside.
The gloss slicked over this alliance just cracked wide open. Polish President Karol Nawrocki stripped Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Poland’s highest civilian honor, the Order of the White Eagle. It’s an unprecedented diplomatic slap in the face. The trigger? Zelenskyy signed off on naming an elite Ukrainian military unit after the "Heroes of the UPA"—the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Discover more on a connected topic: this related article.
To many Ukrainians today, the UPA represents the desperate, heroic struggle for independence against both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. To Poles, the UPA represents one word, genocide.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk is now stuck in the middle of a political minefield. He's trying to salvage a critical wartime partnership while managing a Polish electorate that's increasingly furious about how Ukraine handles its wartime legacy. Tusk openly admitted the danger, warning how easy it is to inflame anti-Polish sentiment in Ukraine and anti-Ukrainian sentiment in Poland for short-term political gain. He’s pleading for restraint, but when history turns into a weapon, restraint is usually the first casualty. More reporting by Associated Press explores comparable perspectives on the subject.
The Blood in the Soil
You can't understand why Poles are so angry without looking at what actually happened between 1943 and 1945 in Volhynia and eastern Galicia. These regions are in modern-day western Ukraine, but back then, they were occupied by Nazi Germany and home to large Polish and Ukrainian populations.
The UPA, led ideologically by Stepan Bandera, wanted to ensure that when World War II ended, these lands would be entirely Ukrainian. Their method was a coordinated campaign of ethnic cleansing. On July 11, 1943—a day Poles remember as Bloody Sunday—the UPA launched synchronized attacks on around 100 Polish villages. They didn't just target military age men. They targeted everyone.
Historians estimate that UPA units and local collaborators brutally murdered between 40,000 and 100,000 Polish civilians. Villages were burned to the ground. Families were hacked to death in their homes and churches. The Polish underground, primarily the Home Army, launched vicious reprisal attacks, killing an estimated 2,000 to 12,000 Ukrainians. The disproportion in casualties is stark, and the trauma remains deeply hardwired into the Polish national consciousness. Poland’s parliament has officially recognized the Volhynia massacres as genocide.
The Battle Over Dead Bodies
The current diplomatic row isn't just an argument among academic historians over old textbooks. It has real, practical consequences for families who want to bury their ancestors. Right now, thousands of Polish victims of the Volhynia massacres lie in unmarked mass graves across western Ukraine.
Poland wants to find them, exhume them, and give them proper burials. Sounds simple enough, but politics blocked the shovels. In 2017, Ukraine’s Institute of National Remembrance placed a ban on Polish-led exhumations. Kyiv did this to retaliate after an illegal UPA monument was dismantled in the Polish village of Hruszowice.
While there have been occasional glimmers of hope and minor concessions, that ban remains a massive roadblock. Polish Defense Chief Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz recently told Ukrainian officials that the memory of the Volhynia victims is simply not subject to negotiation. For Warsaw, the equation is straightforward, if you want a future together, you have to let us bury our dead.
Tusk vs the Polish Electorate
Donald Tusk is trying to play the adult in the room, but his domestic audience isn't making it easy. He knows that Poland’s strategic survival depends on a stable, independent Ukraine. If Ukraine falls, Poland faces a hostile Russia directly on its eastern border. That’s why Tusk keeps insisting that Poland’s long-term interests require building relations based on a vision of the future, not the traumas of the past.
The problem is that the Polish public is getting tired. The initial wave of total solidarity that followed the 2022 invasion has cooled down. People are weary of the economic strain, anxious about long-term refugee integration, and angry about ongoing trade disputes over cheap Ukrainian grain flooding the European market.
When Zelenskyy honored the UPA fighters, it felt like a betrayal to ordinary Poles. An SW Research poll conducted for the Rzeczpospolita daily revealed that 51.9% of Poles said the decision to honor the UPA actively harmed their attitude toward Ukraine. Tusk is trying to run a foreign policy based on cold, hard realism, but he’s doing it in a democracy where voters are driven by raw emotion and historical memory.
Moving Past the Stalemate
Kyiv's response to the honor revocation was defensive. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha blasted the move as a strategic error, stating that no foreign president is going to dictate Ukraine's history. Kyiv argues that they aren't honoring the UPA for the atrocities in Volhynia, but for their fierce resistance against the Soviet regime—a regime that spent decades trying to erase Ukrainian identity.
But that nuance doesn't fly in Warsaw. For Poland, honoring an organization that slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians is a non-starter, regardless of who else that organization fought.
If these two nations want to keep their alliance from splintering, they need to decouple current security cooperation from historical reckonings. The immediate, actionable steps require a compromise that honors the victims without sabotaging the front lines. Ukraine needs to unconditionally lift the moratorium on the exhumation of Polish victims, allowing families to finally close a horrific chapter. Concurrently, both nations must establish an independent, joint commission of historians to document the events of Volhynia without political interference from either Warsaw or Kyiv. True mutual respect cannot be built on enforced silence or whitewashed massacres. It can only survive if both sides stop using the ghosts of World War II to score points at home.
