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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will skip a key post-war recovery conference in Poland this week, Kyiv said Tuesday, amid a spiralling diplomatic spat between the allies over World War II memory. Zelensky infuriated Warsaw last month by naming a military unit after the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a group that took part in massacres against Poles during World War II. Poland’s nationalist president Karol Nawrocki responded by stripping Zelensky of Warsaw’s highest honour, the Order of the White Eagle, prompting several top Ukrainian officials to hand back their Polish awards.

The row threatens to overshadow the Ukraine Recovery Conference, which is scheduled to begin in Gdansk on Thursday and aims to gather business leaders and officials to discuss the post-war reconstruction of Ukraine. Ukraine’s foreign ministry spokesman Georgiy Tykhy said Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko would lead the delegation, citing the need to avoid “excessive politicisation” and “scandals”.”Through diplomatic channels we are in constant contact,” he said of relations with Poland.

Warsaw has been one of Ukraine’s main allies since Russia invaded in 2022, taking in hundreds of thousands of refugees and offering itself as a logistics hub for Western support to Kyiv. The conference — previously held in Rome, Berlin and Lugano in Switzerland — was meant to solidify Warsaw’s position as Kyiv’s neighbour and ally, amid concerns in Poland that it could be sidelined during eventual peace talks.

Earlier Tuesday, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk — Nawrocki’s political opponent — sought to defuse tensions.”I am also counting on the fact that on both the Polish and the Ukrainian side there will be more people who will be able to stand up to these moods and emotions, and who will lead both Poland and Ukraine toward the future,” he said.- ‘We are defending Poland’ -Despite being an ally of Ukraine, Tusk has said the blame for the diplomatic crisis lies with Kyiv and called on Zelensky to reverse his decision to name the military unit after the UPA.

Poland’s demand fuelled fury in Ukraine. Over the weekend, Zelensky accused Polish politicians of trying to score “political points” domestically and accused them of fuelling anti-Ukrainian sentiment.”We are defending Poland, we are defending Europe right now, not the other way around. Our fighters are defending it, and Ukrainians are dying,” he told Ukrainian media Sunday.

Zelensky symbolically returned the Polish award over the weekend and — in a show of solidarity — his predecessors Leonid Kuchma, Viktor Yushchenko and Petro Poroshenko also sent theirs back. The UPA fought both the Nazis and the Soviets in its quest for a Ukrainian state. It killed thousands of Polish civilians between 1943 and 1945 in Volhynia — a Ukrainian region that was part of Poland before World War II.

Zelensky said he named the military unit after the UPA following requests from Ukrainian soldiers, and that he had signed similar decrees “hundreds of times during the war”.”I’ve never told them (soldiers) what I like or don’t like,” he said. Some in the Ukrainian army have invoked the legacy of the UPA as an anti-Soviet force, a trend criticised by both Warsaw and Moscow, who see the insurgents as war criminals and Nazi collaborators.

Zelensky has accused Polish politicians of trying to gain domestically from the spat ahead of parliamentary elections next year.”You radicalise society and where will this social hatred lead? To ratings. This is a political struggle that can end badly,” Zelensky said. Poland is home to over 1.5 million Ukrainians — both refugees who came after 2022 and economic migrants. In recent weeks, there have been a string of anti-Ukrainian incidents in Poland.burs/ach 

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:47:05 GMT