WARSAW — The council that advises Poland’s president on the country’s highest state decoration met on Monday to consider stripping Volodymyr Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle — and left without agreement, deepening a rift inside the Polish government that Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski had already made public the day before.
A decision from President Karol Nawrocki is now expected Tuesday or Wednesday, according to sources cited by Polskie Radio. After Sunday’s council session, attendees were asked to refrain from speaking to the media until the president announced his ruling — an instruction that, by the time it was issued, had already been overtaken by events. Sikorski had spoken on June 8, and his words were not easy to walk back.
What Sikorski said, directed at journalists after the council session, was not a defense of Zelensky’s decision to name an elite Ukrainian special operations unit after the Heroes of the UPA. He called that decision a mistake. What he said, instead, was that the remedy Nawrocki had chosen was its own kind of mistake — and that the manner in which Warsaw resolved the dispute would say something about Poland that Warsaw might not want said.
“I personally believe it would be strange if, narrowing the matter to the living, the Order of the White Eagle is held by former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder — who receives money from Putin — rather than by the one who fights with Putin,” Sikorski told reporters, according to Interfax Ukraine. He added that he hoped the council and the president would make “a wise decision.”
The Schröder point is not a technicality. The former German chancellor, who governed Berlin from 1998 to 2005, sits on the board of the Russian state oil giant Rosneft, declined to condemn Russia’s full-scale military operation in Ukraine, and as recently as 2025 publicly defended the Nord Stream pipeline project and described his cooperation with Moscow as “proven.” He holds the White Eagle. Zelensky, under whose government Ukrainian forces have fought for more than four years, would lose it. That is the optics Sikorski is asking Nawrocki to consider before he acts.
Nawrocki initiated the revocation proceedings after Zelensky issued a decree on May 27 granting the honorific “Heroes of the UPA” to the Separate Special Operations Center North of Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces. The UPA — the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, armed wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists — fought against Soviet forces and Nazi Germany during the Second World War, but is also responsible for the mass killing of Polish civilians in Volhynia in 1943. Polish historians estimate the Volhynia massacre claimed between 50,000 and 100,000 lives — a wound in Polish national memory that has never entirely closed.
Zelensky said the designation was intended to revive “historical traditions of the national army” and recognize the unit’s role in defending Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Nawrocki received that explanation with what he described as great sadness. “President Zelensky has provided the best material and plenty of oxygen for Russian propaganda,” he told reporters on May 29, according to the Kyiv Post. Warsaw’s foreign ministry also criticized Kyiv’s move, with spokesperson Maciej Wewiór writing that the decision “hurts the memory of the victims of this organization and undermines dialogue between our nations.”
The council that convened Monday is an advisory body — the final authority to revoke the decoration rests with the president, but the process also requires a countersignature from Poland’s prime minister. That detail matters. Donald Tusk, whose ruling coalition is frequently at odds with Nawrocki on foreign policy, has so far sought to calm tensions rather than inflame them. Shortly after Zelensky’s UPA decree, Tusk warned publicly that Russia would be the only beneficiary of open conflict between Warsaw and Kyiv. Whether Tusk would countersign a revocation has not been answered — and no answer has been sought, at least not publicly.
That constitutional ambiguity is one reason Sikorski’s intervention landed as hard as it did. The foreign minister sits in Tusk’s government, not Nawrocki’s office. His public remarks the day the council met were not an accident of timing. Former Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz was more direct in his assessment, telling reporters the entire affair had been mishandled: the president, he said, had “gained nothing, while we, as Poland, have lost a significant amount of prestige,” as reported by Ukrainska Pravda. Czaputowicz described Zelensky’s UPA decision as a serious mistake — but also described Nawrocki’s response as one.
What this has become, in the week since Nawrocki announced his intention, is less a clean diplomatic signal and more a test of whether a right-wing president and a centrist prime minister can agree on the terms of a rebuke. The Order of the White Eagle has been awarded to foreign heads of state as a sign of strategic partnership. Zelensky received it from Nawrocki’s predecessor, Andrzej Duda, in April 2023 — a moment meant to signal Polish solidarity with Ukraine in the early stages of the war. Stripping it sends a message; the question Warsaw has not resolved is what message, and to whom.
Poland’s relationship with Ukraine has grown more complicated across 2026, for reasons that extend beyond the UPA dispute. Warsaw ruled out transferring SAFE-funded weapons to Ukraine in early June, with Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz citing legal constraints on the European defence mechanism. Warsaw Interior Minister Tomasz Siemoniak warned separately that Zelensky risked eroding Polish public support for Ukraine — support that Warsaw has spent years cultivating as the bedrock of its eastern policy. The UPA decision gave critics in Poland something concrete to point to, but the friction it exposed had been building for months.
Nawrocki is expected to announce his decision on the White Eagle before the end of the week. What remains unclear is whether the council’s divided opinion, Sikorski’s Schröder objection, and the unresolved question of a prime ministerial countersignature will alter his course — or whether the president, having staked his credibility on the revocation publicly, has already decided that the diplomatic cost of changing direction is higher than the cost of proceeding.
