Polish-Ukrainian diplomatic spat hasn’t touched its memorial work in Lviv

Poland’s president stripped Ukraine’s Zelenskyy of his top state honor last month, and Zelenskyy mailed it back—the lowest point in Polish‑Ukrainian relations since the full‑scale war began.

At the same time, Poland’s consulate in Lviv displayed a memorial to fallen Ukrainian soldiers of Polish descent on its fence for three years. Now the exhibition is touring Poland and Ukraine instead—and drawing requests to travel to towns that have never hosted it before.

Both things are true of the same diplomatic outpost. Poland’s Consulate General in Lviv, an arm of the same state that just permanently archived Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Order of the White Eagle, is simultaneously the institution that has spent three years helping a Ukrainian journalist track down the families of soldiers it continues to commemorate.

39 names, one exhibition

The exhibition, “Byłem Polakiem—obywatelem Ukrainy” (“I Was a Pole—a Citizen of Ukraine”), names 39 people: Ukrainian citizens of Polish descent killed fighting Russia since 2022, alongside a handful of Poles who died defending Ukraine.

It was created by journalist Dmytro Antoniuk for the Center for Polish Culture and European Dialogue in Ivano‑Frankivsk, with funding from Poland’s Foreign Ministry, the Polish Senate, and the Lviv consulate itself, which also helped locate relatives of the fallen.

Antoniuk found most of his subjects by phone and in person, not from records. He worked through parish priests, Polish associations, and consulate staff in Lviv, Kyiv, and Vinnytsia, who passed word to families that the exhibition was being assembled.

In the village of Susly, in Zhytomyr Oblast, he traced six Polish-descent residents killed in the war—four of them from a single family, cousins, an uncle, and a nephew. Some relatives he found refused to be included. One local government in western Ukraine, suspicious he was running a scam, asked him to send his passport details before they would help.

A Polish NGO recently borrowed the exhibition for the Folkowisko Festival in the village of Gorajec in Podkarpackie Voivodeship; it is scheduled to travel next to the Ukrainian village of Nahachiv, according to Marek Radziwon, Poland’s Consul General in Lviv, who said requests have also come in from other Polish towns.

It has previously been shown in Kyiv, Odesa, Uzhhorod, Warsaw, Poznan, Krakow, and Rzeszow, and once hung on the fence of Ukraine’s own consulate in Krakow. Radziwon also said a new exhibition of Polish war photography, “Eyes of War”, is going up on the consulate grounds this week.

Why Poland and Ukraine are at odds

In the background, the dispute driving the rupture between the two countries continues. Zelenskyy’s 27 May decree honoring a special operations unit as “Heroes of the UPA”—the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, blamed in Poland for the 1943‑1945 Volhynia massacres—prompted Nawrocki to strip him of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest honor.

Zelenskyy mailed the medal back on 20 June; Warsaw confirmed it arrived two days later and will be archived permanently, never to be awarded again. Polish Prime Minister Tusk called the standoff “a strategic mistake that will cost both sides: in business, geopolitically, and reputationally.”

A KIIS survey found 90% of Ukrainians favor a constructive approach to the historical dispute—57% say each nation should keep its own heroes without interference, 33% favor joint historian commissions—while just 5% backed forcing either country to adopt the other’s view.

The Lviv consulate’s fence carried, until recently, a memorial built explicitly on the premise that Ukrainian and Polish dead belong on the same wall, and even with this exhibition now traveling, there will be a new one.

“Eyes of War” is a long-term, multi-part initiative by the Polish Press Club in collaboration with partner organizations, presenting photographs from the war against Ukraine taken by Polish photographers, who constitute the largest group of foreign correspondents in Ukraine.

Antoniuk has framed his project as a continuation of the alliance that took Kyiv together in May 1920 and defended Warsaw months later. The consulate funding it has not changed that framing, even now.