by Stefano Caprio

For years, drawing on its own interpretation of history, the Kremlin has promoted the view that the Polish and Ukrainian national myths are fundamentally incompatible, and that a clash between them was only a matter of time. After 2022, this theory seemed to have been laid to rest once and for all. Today, the leaders in Warsaw and Kyiv have brought it back into vogue with their own hands.

Four Ukrainian presidents – the current president, Volodymyr Zelenskyj, and his three predecessors, Leonid Kučma, Viktor Yuščenko and Petro Porošenko – have almost simultaneously returned parcels to Warsaw containing cases holding Poland’s highest honour, the Order of the White Eagle. Alongside them, the head of the Ukrainian Presidential Office, Kyrylo Budanov, and the Ukrainian ambassador to Poland, Vasyl Bodnar, have renounced their Polish honours.

What began as a pre-election manoeuvre by Warsaw has turned into a complete dismantling of the previous model of relations. The spark that triggered the explosion was Zelenskyj’s decree, signed at the end of May, conferring upon a unit of the Ukrainian Special Forces the honorary title of ‘Heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army’.

For Warsaw, this was a slap in the face, confirmation that the organisation responsible for the Volhynia massacre of 1943–1944 remains in the Ukrainian national pantheon.

Announcing in a speech the revocation of the Order of the White Eagle from Volodymyr Zelenskyj, the Polish president Karol Nawrocki, a member of the nationalist PiS party, stated that “there are limits in Polish-Ukrainian relations that must not be crossed”, emphasising that “the decision is not directed against the Ukrainian people” and does not alter the strategic direction of policy: support for Ukraine will continue, Nawrocki assured.

In April 2023, Zelenskyj had been awarded the Order of the White Eagle by the then President Andrzej Duda “in recognition of his exceptional contribution to deepening friendly and comprehensive relations between Poland and Ukraine, to the development of cooperation for democracy, peace and security in Europe, and for his steadfastness in defending inalienable human rights”.

The friendship between Poles and Ukrainians has, in reality, always been rather tenuous, given that Ukraine’s history begins precisely with the war against the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the mid-17th century, with the Cossack uprising led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who subsequently joined the Tsarist Russian Empire.

Since then, these lands have been a constant theatre of conflict between Eastern and Western Slavs, Russians and Poles, the Eurasian ‘Russian world’ pitted against the European ‘Polish world’.

Even at the ecclesiastical level, the dispute has unfolded in various forms between Latin Rite Catholics, Byzantine Rite Catholics, Orthodox Christians open to dialogue and intransigent Orthodox Christians, with numerous episodes of local and widespread wars, and no shortage of brutal massacres.

In the mind of every Pole, the Volhynia massacre is not merely a tragic episode of the past, but an unresolved national trauma, synonymous with the most brutal ethnic purgatory that claimed the lives of some 100,000 Poles and Jews, evoking the tragedies of past centuries.

Zelenskyy has conferred similar honorary titles on various military units on several occasions since Russia’s invasion in 2022, and always, as in this case, this has taken place exclusively on their own initiative – commonly described as ‘from the bottom up’ – rather than as part of the president’s personal ideological agenda; yet this argument has not been taken into account in Poland.

The dynamics of the subsequent Polish reaction conceal a deep-seated resentment in the public consciousness. Nawrocki, who headed the Institute of National Remembrance before becoming president, literally imposed the decision desired by the Chapter of the Order – the ‘highest expert supervisory body’ tasked with safeguarding the honour of the state and providing the head of state with recommendations regarding honours and revocations.

The members of this council – some of whom harboured doubts – kept the verdict they were being pressured towards, and what they ultimately recommended to the Head of State, hidden from the public and the press until the very last moment.

Nawrocki forced them to accept his rules, although formally the final decision has not yet been taken: the procedure requires the signing of the relevant addendum to the decree by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a representative of the liberal wing of Polish politics.

The two strands of sovereignty and liberalism effectively represent the perennial contradiction of the Eastern Slavic world, of which Ukraine is the main scapegoat. If Tusk were to sign the decree now, he would suffer serious reputational damage on the international stage, severing ties with Kyiv once and for all and alienating the centrist wing of his own coalition.

If, on the other hand, he blocks the decision, the right will immediately accuse him of betraying the national memory. The level of resentment within the Polish government establishment is revealed by the reaction of Jakub Stefaniak, deputy head of the Prime Minister’s Office, who told Polskie Radio Jedynka that “Nawrocki behaved like a nursery school child, who immediately runs off to the playground to wee in the sandpit”.

Stefaniak emphasised that the president simply wanted to “make a splash” in the media to boost his ratings, although, for procedural reasons, he could not take such a decision unilaterally. It is important to note that this is not an opposition blogger speaking, but a senior official in Tusk’s inner circle, who is publicly accusing the head of state of dangerous childish behaviour.

Polish society is therefore divided, and disproportionately so: polls show that 52 per cent of Poles approve of the revocation of Zelensky’s honour, whilst only 24 per cent oppose it. For Nawrocki, these are reassuring figures, but still a long way from the 90 per cent consensus to which he aspires.

Some observers, however, believe that this high-profile move is not so much a triumph for Nawrocki as a form of electoral ‘self-sabotage’: by undermining the fragile consensus on security along the eastern flank for the sake of short-term domestic popularity, the president is committing political suicide, restricting his own room for manoeuvre on the international stage, and transforming the office of the presidency from a national arbiter into a hostage of the far right.

No less significant than the internal upheavals in this divided world is Kyiv’s response to the affair: Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sibiha described Nawrocki’s decision as a “strategic error”, in turn pointedly refusing the Polish honour.

His statement, that “no president of another state will dictate our history to us any longer”, effectively brought an era of fragile mutual support to an end. For three years, Ukrainian diplomacy had swallowed every internal Polish electoral attack, from farmers’ border blockades to harsh statements from the right.

The logic was simple: “Poland is our main rear support; we must hold out”, and now that facade has crumbled. Sibiha has begun to speak the language of open conflict: “we will respond in kind”, “the time when we turned a blind eye is over” and other threatening phrases with which Kyiv has begun to address Warsaw with the same harshness previously reserved for Viktor Orbán’s Budapest, another historic part of the Russian-Ukrainian world ravaged by war.

Behind the scandal lies a central issue that has been ignored for three years: what has Poland gained from the unprecedented aid to Ukraine since February 2022? Merely the security of NATO’s eastern flank and the containment of Russia, or something more? Judging by Nawrocki’s actions and the reaction of Polish society, Warsaw was convinced that the aid package included a tacit moral right to act as Ukraine’s historical arbiter.

The status of ‘best friend’, in the Polish sense of the term, conferred upon it a right of veto over the pantheon of Ukrainian heroes. With the return flight of the White Eagle, Kyiv has replied in the negative: sovereignty over its own memory is not to be bartered away, not even for tanks, bullets or open borders.

This is why the current crisis is deeper and more dangerous than all previous disputes over wheat or haulage companies, where the focus was on content and details, whereas here the debate centres on rights, and on who will sit at the table where history is written.

From this purely internal and pragmatic game emerges an outcome devoid of the usual political clichés. Andriy Sibiha, in his angry retort, also countered that ‘it is no coincidence that Nawrocki is receiving applause from Moscow’.

And it is not merely a matter of Russia rejoicing at the division of its allies; for the first time in three years, Moscow has received a strategic gift that it could not have obtained on its own through any hybrid operation.

For years, drawing on its own interpretation of history, the Kremlin has promoted the thesis that Polish and Ukrainian national myths are fundamentally incompatible, and that their clash was only a matter of time: after 2022, this theory seemed definitively buried, whilst today the leaders in Warsaw and Kyiv have revived this thesis with their own hands. Two national memories have collided head-on, at a time when neither side could least afford it.

“Is Nawrocki perhaps reserving the country’s highest honours for Catherine II, Mussolini and Gerhard Schröder?”, asked Volodymyr Zelenskyj in a less-than-diplomatic tone, evoking three centuries of history and wounds scattered across Europe.

RUSSIAN WORLD IS THE ASIANEWS NEWSLETTER DEDICATED TO RUSSIA. WOULD YOU LIKE TO RECEIVE IT EVERY SATURDAY? TO SUBSCRIBE, CLICK HERE.