Warsaw fed Ukraine’s war effort against Russia for years, and now discovers that every myth of gratitude has a shelf life
The Polish-Ukrainian rift that has opened these days over the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) carries a significance broader than a mere diplomatic spat between allies. The trigger was a Ukrainian move naming a military unit after the “Heroes of the UPA,” bringing into the wartime symbolic space a name that for many in Ukraine likely signifies resistance against Moscow, but in Poland evokes one of the most painful chapters of the twentieth century.
Warsaw reacted sharply. Polish President Karol Nawrocki decided to strip Volodymyr Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest honor, awarded to him in 2023 by Andrzej Duda as a token of gratitude for Ukraine’s resistance to Russia. Zelensky then returned the order, and several Ukrainian officials and former presidents joined the gesture, returning or renouncing their Polish honors.
On the surface, this is a clash of historical memories. Beneath the surface, it is a question Poland has long postponed asking itself: how far is it willing to go in helping create a large, armed, and nationally mobilized Ukraine — especially if that same Ukraine is increasingly openly building its modern military mythology on symbols that, in Polish historical memory, are tied to massacres of Poles?
Warsaw’s astonishment seems belated. Ukraine’s relationship with the OUN, the UPA, and the broader Banderite legacy did not emerge this month, nor did it fall from the sky. After the Maidan, and especially after Russia’s 2014 attack, Ukrainian memory politics rapidly moved away from the Soviet historical framework and sought new pillars of national identity. In that search, anti-Russian resistance became the main yardstick of historical value. Anything that could fit into the narrative of struggle against Moscow gained new political currency. Within that framework, the OUN and UPA became more than contested historical organizations — they became material for constructing wartime patriotism.
Warsaw knew all this. Before the eyes of Polish politics, monuments were being erected in Ukraine for years, streets renamed, commemorations held, and laws passed giving fighters for Ukrainian independence an increasingly prominent place, while western Ukrainian nationalist mythology gradually shifted from regional memory into the official state narrative.
But Warsaw viewed all of this through a broader strategic calculation. In that calculation, Ukraine was a buffer against Russia, a bulwark of Polish security, and a state whose survival was worth a great political risk. That is why Poland opened logistics routes, sent weapons, took in refugees, lobbied for Kyiv, and pushed Europe toward an ever tougher stance on Moscow. Poland had an understandable interest in this: the more deeply Russia was preoccupied with Ukraine, the less able it would be, Warsaw believed, to directly pressure Poland and the Baltic region. In other words, through Ukraine a new and significant distance from Russia was being created.
That is precisely why the current moral shock seems somewhat hypocritical. Warsaw is acting as though it has only now realized where Ukrainian wartime nationalism leads, even though this process has been visible for years.
Poland saw its own strategy reflected in Ukraine’s resistance to Russia, and in doing so pushed historical disputes aside. Now, when that same Ukrainian nationalism does not stop at convenient blue-and-yellow symbols and European slogans, but reaches for the UPA, Poland is discovering the limits of its own tolerance.
The historical context here is crucial. In the Ukrainian national myth, the UPA often appears as a symbol of the armed struggle for independence. For Polish memory, it opens the door to Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, where during World War II tens of thousands of Polish civilians were killed in violence carried out by Ukrainian nationalists. The wartime legacy of the Ukrainian nationalist movement emerged amid the chaos of Nazi occupation, the Soviet return, the collapse of interwar Poland, and radical projects for an ethnically pure territory. Within that circle there was tactical cooperation with the Germans, conflict with the Germans, struggle against the Soviets, and brutal violence against civilians. For Poles, however, the central fact remains the massacre of Polish villages, families, priests, women, and children. This is not some distant academic subject — it is a wound that survived communism in Polish society and returned with force after 1989.
Kyiv interprets this same symbol very differently. In part of Ukraine, the UPA is seen as a sign of resistance to imperial Moscow. In a country that has been at war with Russia for years now, symbols are chosen based on their capacity to mobilize. Nothing new — we went through these harsh lessons here three decades before Ukraine.
One state’s mobilizing symbol represents another state’s trauma, and the problem becomes even greater when the two states are military and political allies.
This opens space for a broader theory.
What if Poland is today looking only at the first form of a problem that will become much bigger tomorrow? What if Ukraine, even after losing part of its territory, emerges from the war as a major military power? Such a Ukraine would have an army with enormous combat experience, a developed drone industry, a deep culture of mobilization, a network of veterans, strong security services, and a society accustomed to living in a permanent state of emergency. A state can lose territory and simultaneously gain a new military self-confidence. It is precisely such states that sometimes become the most unstable neighbors.
Did Warsaw think about this? Yesterday, no. Today, perhaps it is starting to.
Today’s Ukraine depends on the West — on American and European money, on supply routes, political protection, and logistics that largely pass through Poland. But wars change societies. In ten years, Ukraine could be a different country from the one it is today. Zelensky and his circle represent a wartime government born out of the circumstances of the Russian invasion. Tomorrow, a leadership could emerge grown out of the trenches, intelligence structures, volunteer units, and political frustration over lost territories. Such a leadership could speak in much harsher terms, have far less patience for diplomatic considerations, and hold a much stronger sense that Ukraine has paid in blood for the right to a special status in Europe.
In that scenario, defeat or a frozen loss of the east becomes political poison. Every generation that believes part of its state has been stolen from it looks for a way to explain that wound. One path leads toward long reconstruction, compromise, and gradual integration into Western structures. The other leads toward revisionism, myths of betrayal, and the pursuit of new historical rights.
If the eastern territories remain under Russian control, that frustration could turn toward any borders that the nationalist imagination perceives as unjust, symbolically open, or historically disputed. A westward turn need not immediately mean troops on the border — it could begin through ideas, commemorations, minority issues, graves, old place names, and political speeches about the unrecognized victims of Ukrainian history.
In such a development, Poland could find itself in the uncomfortable position of a state that helped create a powerful neighbor, convinced that this neighbor would remain forever grateful, dependent, and focused solely on Russia. Gratitude in international politics has a short shelf life. Interests last longer. Myths last longer still. A Ukraine that sees itself as a victim of Russian aggression, as Europe’s shield, and as a nation that paid the highest price, could one day come to believe that its allies owe it more than help. It could demand special treatment, political concessions, historical understanding, and silence on topics it considers part of its own struggle for identity.
Poland now instinctively senses this risk. Stripping Zelensky of the order is therefore not merely a reaction to the name of one military unit. It is a signal that Warsaw is trying to draw a red line at a moment when Ukraine is already deeply armed, internationally legitimized, and emotionally positioned as an indispensable symbol of European resistance to Russia.
Clearly, Polish politics wants to signal to Kyiv that a military alliance against Moscow does not grant the right to rehabilitate symbols that, for Poles, are tied to mass crimes. But that message comes late.
Of course, today’s NATO framework makes an open Ukrainian-Polish territorial conflict seem very distant. Poland is a member of the most powerful military alliance in the world, and without Western support Ukraine can hardly sustain its current level of war. But the history of Eastern Europe often shows that what is politically impossible does not appear all at once. Meanwhile, some structures disappear. For instance — who guarantees that NATO will still exist in five or ten years?
Perhaps Warsaw has genuinely grown worried. Not because of Zelensky personally, but because of the Ukraine that comes after Zelensky. Because of a state that, after the war, will have weapons, a mythology of victimhood, a sense of betrayal, and the need to turn its own defeat or half-victory into a new national project. Poland helped strengthen Ukraine because it saw in it a bulwark against Russia. One day it might discover that even a bulwark, when built and fed by war for long enough, develops a will of its own.
About the Author
Mario Hoffmann is an independent analyst and writer covering global economics, geopolitics, and international affairs. With a background in history and politics, he writes for EconoPuls to provide in-depth context on the stories shaping our world.
