Poland’s Tusk expects Ukraine to take first step to ease White Eagle crisis

Poland expects Ukraine to make the first move toward de-escalating the diplomatic crisis between the two countries, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said at a press conference on 4 July, Polsat News reported.

Warsaw had received conciliatory signals from current and former Ukrainian officials, he said, among them former president Viktor Yushchenko, who wrote him what Tusk called a heartfelt letter urging both sides to keep the past from governing the future.

The standoff has hardened into a mutual rupture between two wartime allies at a moment Ukraine can ill afford one. Poland is the main transit route for Western arms reaching the front and a decisive voice on Ukraine's bid to join the European Union, and Polish and Ukrainian civil-society groups, along with historians on both sides, have warned that the feud serves only Moscow.

What Tusk said

Tusk did not spell out what concrete step Warsaw wants, saying only that it would be good to hear a clear signal from Kyiv and that Ukraine was making an effort. He again called President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's decision that triggered the rupture an unfortunate one. A day earlier, on 3 July, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski met his Ukrainian counterpart Andrii Sybiha in Warsaw, the first movement between the governments before Tusk's remarks.

How the rupture unfolded

The crisis began on 26 May, when Zelenskyy signed a decree granting the honorary title "Heroes of the UPA" to a special operations unit, the Separate Center of Special Operations "Pivnich." President Karol Nawrocki responded on 19 June by stripping Zelenskyy of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest state honor. Zelenskyy mailed it back the next day; Warsaw confirmed the decoration's return and said it would be archived permanently. Three former Ukrainian presidents renounced their own White Eagles in protest.

The dispute over the UPA

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army is one of the most contested subjects in Polish-Ukrainian memory. In Poland it is blamed for the massacres of Polish civilians in Volhynia in 1943–1945, which Warsaw recognizes as genocide; Polish historians say UPA units attacked around 150 Polish-inhabited localities in the region in July 1943 alone. In Ukraine, the UPA is widely seen as a movement that fought both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union for national independence, and Ukrainian historians tend to frame the killings as part of a broader wartime conflict in which both sides bore responsibility.

Kyiv has shown no sign of reversing the unit's name. A June survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found 90% of Ukrainians favor a constructive approach to the historical disputes — 57% saying each country should keep its own heroes without interference, and just 5% backing a confrontational line.