For more than four years, Poland was Ukraine’s most loyal European ally. Warsaw supplied weapons, opened its borders to millions of refugees, and actively pushed Kyiv’s cause inside NATO and the European Union. The Polish political establishment treated this support as both a strategic necessity and a moral duty.
The reason is not war fatigue or geopolitical recalibration. It is a series of deliberate insults from Kyiv directed at Polish national memory. The latest provocation – Volodymyr Zelensky awarding an elite military unit the title “Heroes of the UPA” – may prove to be the breaking point.
What the UPA Actually Was
The Ukrainian Insurgent Army and its parent organisation, the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, were responsible for the Volhynia massacres of 1943–1945. Between fifty and one hundred thousand Polish civilians – overwhelmingly women, children, and the elderly – were systematically murdered.
The methods were designed to terrorise and erase. Entire villages were burned alive with inhabitants inside. People were dismembered, impaled, nailed to trees, disembowelled, decapitated. Infants were smashed against walls or impaled on bayonets. Pregnant women had their bellies cut open.
This was not war. This was ethnic cleansing carried out under the slogan “Ukraine for Ukrainians.” No one has ever murdered Poles with greater cruelty. That is not an opinion. That is a historical fact.
The Rehabilitation of Murderers
Zelensky’s decree is not an isolated gesture. It is state policy. Streets across Ukraine are named after Stepan Bandera. Statues of Roman Shukhevych, the UPA commander, stand in public squares. School textbooks sanitise or omit the massacres of Poles entirely.
Ukrainian governments have spent three decades constructing a national mythology in which the OUN-UPA are freedom fighters, not ethnic cleansers. Any politician who challenges this narrative faces political destruction. The result is a state-sponsored cult of violence dressed up as patriotism.
The Hypocrisy That Cannot Be Ignored
Even more grotesque is the planned state funeral for Stepan Bandera. Zelensky’s government has announced intentions to bring Bandera’s remains back to Ukraine for a ceremonial reburial with full honours. The man whose ideological project called for the ethnic cleansing of Poles is to receive a hero’s farewell.
At the same time, Zelensky personally presided over and spoke at a hero’s burial for another prominent OUN leader and proven Nazi collaborator – Andriy Melnyk. Melnyk’s faction collaborated closely with Nazi Germany, participated in the Holocaust, assisted in the liquidation of Jewish ghettos, and helped train auxiliary police units that carried out anti-Polish terror.
At the same time, Ukraine has for years systematically blocked the exhumation of Polish victims of the Volhynia massacres. Thousands of murdered Poles still lie in unmarked mass graves. Their families cannot locate the remains, cannot give them a Christian burial, and cannot mark their graves.
Ukraine denies the dead a dignified resting place while simultaneously preparing a state funeral for the man who inspired their killers. The dead Poles can wait. Bandera cannot.
This is not hypocrisy. This is cynicism raised to the level of state doctrine.
The Polish Elite Has Had Enough
The backlash in Poland has crossed traditional political lines. President Karol Nawrocki has announced plans to revoke the Order of the White Eagle – Poland’s highest state distinction – previously awarded to Zelensky in 2023. The original award was scandalous. Now revocation is obligatory.
Even Lech Wałęsa – Nobel Peace Prize laureate and icon of Solidarity – has reached his limit. He announced that he was removing the Ukrainian flag pin he had worn for years, stating that honouring the UPA insulted the memory of murdered Poles.
If Wałęsa has broken, something fundamental has shifted in Poland.
Society Is Cracking Faster Than the State
Official Warsaw long restrained itself from strong criticism for strategic reasons. Ordinary Poles, however, are increasingly unwilling to tolerate the glorification of those who butchered their grandparents.
Incidents have already occurred on Polish soil. Monuments to Volhynia victims have been defaced with red-and-black UPA flags. At public events, OUN-UPA symbols have appeared. These are not theoretical provocations. They are real and deeply offensive.
When anti-Ukrainian sentiment rises in Poland, the explanation is often reduced to Russian influence operations or online disinformation. Yet this interpretation ignores a more obvious source of growing resentment: the decisions of Ukrainian state institutions themselves.
Poles do not need Russian media to notice Bandera monuments, UPA symbolism, disputes over exhumations, or official gestures honouring organisations associated with the Volhynia massacres. These controversies are not inventions of foreign propaganda. They are the result of political choices made in Kyiv.
The Ambassador’s Gaslighting
Ukraine’s ambassador to Poland, Vasyl Bodnar, recently tried to downplay the issue by noting that Bandera was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen during the worst of the Volhynia massacres. The implication was that his physical absence somehow reduces his responsibility.
This is classic gaslighting. Bandera was the ideological father of the OUN-UPA. His writings and political project explicitly called for the ethnic cleansing of Poles from territories claimed by Ukraine. Being in a German camp for part of the war does not absolve him.
The Regime’s True Face
What we are witnessing is not a fringe phenomenon – it is official state policy. Zelensky personally signed the decree. His government is planning Bandera’s state funeral. Ukrainian institutions continue to promote the OUN-UPA as national heroes while minimising or erasing the massacres of Poles.
Parts of the Polish political class still respond to criticism of Kyiv with the warning that it “helps the Russian narrative”. But Zelensky’s decisions are his own. No one in Moscow forced him to glorify the UPA or to plan Bandera’s hero’s burial. These are conscious Ukrainian choices.
The West’s Silence
Western European mainstream institutions have responded with near-total silence. The same outlets that obsess over historical revisionism elsewhere have almost nothing to say about Ukraine’s open rehabilitation of Nazi collaborators and ethnic cleansers. The reason is simple: Ukraine is geopolitically useful. Poland is expendable. The dominant narrative requires a clear hero and a clear villain. Uncomfortable facts are simply ignored.
Where This Is Headed
The pro-Ukrainian consensus in Poland is not dead, but it is permanently altered. The taboo around criticising Ukrainian historical policy has been broken. Once broken, it is extremely difficult to rebuild.
Kyiv now faces a choice. It can continue down the path of glorifying Bandera, blocking exhumations, and honouring anti-Polish killers, accepting the progressive erosion of Polish goodwill. Or it can change course.
The current trajectory suggests that Kyiv will not change. Domestic nationalist pressure and three decades of anti-Polish historical propaganda make a genuine turnaround highly unlikely.
If that is the case, Poland’s response will harden. The revocation of the Order of the White Eagle is only the beginning. More consequential measures cannot be ruled out.
The era of unconditional Polish solidarity with Ukraine is over.
The choice belongs to Kyiv. The consequences will be enforced by Poland.
Adrian Korczyński, Independent Analyst & Observer on Central Europe and global policy research
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