When Volodymyr Zelenskyy awarded an elite Ukrainian military unit the honorary title “Heroes of the UPA” this week, the move triggered an immediate backlash in Poland. President Karol Nawrocki responded by calling for Zelenskyy to be stripped of Poland’s highest state distinction, turning a long-running historical dispute into a fresh diplomatic row between two of Europe’s closest wartime partners. The argument centers on the legacy of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA, a nationalist formation whose place in public memory in each country could not be more different. JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. In Ukraine, the UPA is widely associated with the struggle for independence and resistance to Soviet rule, while in Poland it is remembered above all for the wartime massacres of Polish civilians in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia during the Second World War, crimes that the Polish parliament has recognized as genocide. That divergence helps explain why the latest dispute has generated such a strong reaction across the Polish political spectrum, and not only from the predictable quarters. Nawrocki condemned the decision, but criticism has also come from figures with very different political backgrounds, underscoring how sensitive the issue remains in Poland. Universal outrage Former prime minister Leszek Miller, a veteran of the post-communist left, has argued that honoring the UPA was comparable to Germany naming a military unit after the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi mobile killing squads responsible for mass murder across Eastern Europe.