The demand to revoke the Order of the White Eagle devalued the honour itself, and amounted to a bow toward Moscow

That is precisely why a state that one day says "we can take it back" confesses, in the same breath, to something strange. It admits it never regarded its own honour as thanks for a deed done. It admits the medal was less a mark of esteem than a deposit against future obedience. And a deposit that can be clawed back is no longer an order. It becomes something else, something murky: a pledge, a receipt, a bribe in reverse. Once a state's highest symbol of trust turns into that kind of receipt, the real question is no longer who returns it. The real question is how one is meant to regard a state that rewrote the meaning of its own sacred thing so casually.

I respect Poland, and that is not a figure of speech. This is a nation that passed through partitions and occupations, that truly knows the price of independence and has every right to its own historical memory and its own grief. So this is not about Poland as such. It is about the fact that someone seized on an entirely real pretext to perform a curtsy toward Moscow, and seems not even to have grasped what he was doing. By raising the question of stripping the award, that someone did not devalue Zelensky. He devalued the order.

Here are the facts. On 19 June, Polish president Karol Nawrocki stripped Volodymyr Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle, the country's highest state decoration, which Zelensky had received in April 2023 from the hands of the then president Andrzej Duda. The trigger was a decree of 26 May granting the Special Operations Forces "North" centre an honorary name in tribute to the Heroes of the UPA. The Polish pain threshold, Nawrocki explained, had been crossed; there are limits in the relationship that must not be transgressed; and Kyiv should return to a path of truth and mutual respect. Ukraine answered calmly. Zelensky posted the order back, noting that if this symbol may comfortably remain with Catherine the Great, who wiped Poland off the map, with Benito Mussolini, who later grovelled before Hitler, and with Gerhard Schroeder, then Kyiv would not argue. In his wake, former presidents Leonid Kuchma, Viktor Yushchenko and Petro Poroshenko renounced their Polish honours; the head of the President's Office, Kyrylo Budanov, returned the Golden Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit; and foreign minister Andrii Sybiha reminded everyone that the soldiers chose the name for their own unit and meant nothing anti-Polish by it. Former foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba put the paradox with brutal honesty: the destroyers of the Polish state still adorn the order's roll, yet the man chosen for removal is the one holding the line, for a fourth year, against their direct heir.

And now the heart of the matter, because the very framing is rotten at the root. Where did the assumption come from that Ukraine must measure its internal decisions against a Polish pain threshold? Who appointed whom as overseer of someone else's pantheon? Ukraine has every right to determine, inside its own country, everything, including whose name its units carry. That is a question of Ukrainian memory, not an item to be cleared with a neighbouring capital. And on this point, uncomfortable as it is, the line "this is not purely a Ukrainian affair" rings out from Warsaw and from Moscow alike. The motives differ. The grammar is identical.

For the history of Ukraine and Poland is a million disagreements, and to pretend it reduces to a tidy formula of guilt is not to know that history at all. What was liberation for Ukraine has more than once been catastrophe for the Commonwealth, and the reverse. The Khmelnytsky uprising, which Ukrainians remember as a birth, Poles remember as the opening of the Ruin. The 1918 war for Lviv and the West Ukrainian state are read by one side as a fight for what was theirs and by the other as the loss of what was theirs. Even the rare alliance of Petliura and Pilsudski in 1920 cost Ukraine Galicia and part of Volhynia, ceded to Poland in exchange for military backing. There was the pacification of 1930, there was Volhynia in 1943 with its terrible toll among Polish civilians, there was Operation Vistula in 1947 and the deportation of Ukrainians. Neither nation has sterile hands, and both carry real grief. This is the normal, heavy inheritance of neighbourhood, and grown nations live with it without turning every anniversary into an ultimatum.

But there is one fact the Polish side stubbornly leaves outside the brackets, and it changes the whole picture. Alongside the real tragedies, Moscow for years manufactured terror under someone else's flag. The special groups of the NKVD and NKGB, the so-called false detachments dressed up as the UPA, operated across the western Ukrainian lands from 1944 to 1953, were run from the central apparatus in Moscow, and had an entirely concrete task: to kill with other hands so the blame would fall on the insurgents and so Ukrainians and Poles would be set against each other for good. The detachment of Safat Panasiuk, posing as the UPA, worked in Volhynia between 1944 and 1946; dozens of such groups operated in other districts; the traces of their work are still being found in mass graves. This is documented in declassified archives. Which raises a question there is no hiding from. If Moscow once stitched enmity between Warsaw and Kyiv with counterfeit detachments, then whose work, exactly, is being done by whoever inflames the old wound today over a confiscated medal?

The answer was given by Nawrocki himself, when he conceded that such quarrels hand additional arguments to Russian propaganda. Almost every sober voice on both sides of the border agrees. Prime minister Donald Tusk repeated the obvious: while allies squabble over the past, someone else wins the future, and the front line does not run between Warsaw and Kyiv. Former president Bronislaw Komorowski spoke of the responsibility of both sides, who instead of solving a hard problem took to hurling medals at each other. The leader of the right-wing Confederation, Slawomir Mentzen, by contrast, welcomed the return of the honours, regretting only that they used to be handed out "like sweets." And in the Polish social networks the wave of resentment drowned out the diplomacy, with its refrain about ingratitude and about all that Poland has done for Ukraine. In that refrain, too, one hears not the voice of an ally but the old imperial arithmetic, where help is logged as a debt and the debt is converted into a right to give orders.

The order can indeed be returned by post. In a few days a courier will deliver the box, and the highest symbol of the Commonwealth's trust will lie in Warsaw again, whole and unblemished. The box will come back; the meaning will not. For the moment an honour is used as a threat, it ceases to be an honour for all its bearers at once, and that is a loss not for Kyiv but for Poland itself. I will go on respecting the Polish state and the Polish people. But it is hard to respect the man who, for a momentary gesture, turned a sacred thing into small change and, without meaning to, bowed toward Moscow. For great nations are great precisely in this: they know how to rise above the temptation to reduce their own dignity to the question of whose chest the medal is pinned on today.