The Ukraine Reconstruction Conference, attended by Western donors, will take place in the northern Polish city of Gdansk starting Thursday (June 26). The event unfolds against a backdrop of rarely seen tensions between Ukraine and Poland since the onset of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will not attend the conference. Instead, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko will lead the Kyiv delegation.
The tension stems from Polish President Karol Nawrocki's decision on June 19 to revoke the Order of the White Eagle—Poland's highest honor—from President Zelenskyy. The stated reason is that the UPA, which Zelenskyy has praised, "remains an organization responsible for brutal crimes against Poles" during World War II. In response, Chief of Staff Kyrylo Budanov, Foreign Minister Andriy Sibiha, and former President Petro Poroshenko returned their Polish decorations.
Earlier, on May 22, Zelenskyy attended the reinterment of the ashes of Andriy Melnyk—a leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN)—and his wife at a military cemetery near Kyiv. Four days later, he named an elite military unit after "heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army" (UPA), a paramilitary force born from the OUN that fought in World War II and opposed the Sovietization of western Ukrainian regions that were once part of Poland.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has tried to defuse tensions, writing on social media platform X: "Conflict between Poland and Ukraine pleases (Russian President Vladimir) Putin and shocks our allies. The front is somewhere else."
According to experts, despite the tensions, Polish support for Ukraine militarily is unlikely to change, as both countries view Russia as a far greater existential threat. Anton Shekhotsov, an expert on European far-right groups, noted: "In the Kremlin, they understand that such conflicts have no practical impact on the overall picture, which is Poland's support for Ukraine's military efforts." However, Kremlin-backed media may exploit the UPA issue to drive a wedge between the two nations.
The UPA is a Ukrainian nationalist force that emerged during World War II. Historical records show the UPA collaborated with Nazi Germany, participated in the Holocaust, and killed tens of thousands of Poles in western Ukraine, notably during the Volyn massacre in 1943.
In present-day Ukraine, the UPA is celebrated as patriots who fought for independence. Experts suggest that amid the war with Russia, the Ukrainian government easily uses the heroic symbolism of the UPA as a cheap military tool to boost morale. Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher at the University of Bremen (Germany), observed: "Extreme Ukrainian nationalists are a free or very cheap military force, and they enthusiastically recruit young people to the front with the help of heroic symbols."
Despite historical differences, analysts argue that the current war with Russia has simplified the narrative about those who fought for Ukraine's independence. Vyacheslav Likhachev, an expert on both Ukrainian and Russian extremist groups, concluded: "Of all the UPA's enemies, only one enemy—the one we are fighting now, the Moscow Empire—personified by the former Soviet Union and today by Russia."
