Poland is right to insist that the truth about Volhynia must not be blurred. But moral clarity about the past is not the same as strategic wisdom in the present, and Warsaw’s escalating dispute with Kyiv over Ukraine’s decision to honor the Ukrainian Insurgent Army is turning a legitimate grievance into an act of political self-harm. Poland risks deepening its marginalization from key discussions on Ukraine’s future while jeopardizing both its role in the country’s reconstruction and the relationship that underpins Warsaw’s regional ambitions. JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was a nationalist formation whose units carried out the killings of an estimated 100,000 Polish civilians in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia between 1943 and 1945, in what is now western Ukraine. The massacres remain among the most painful chapters in Polish historical memory, and Poland officially recognises them as genocide, a characterisation that Ukraine rejects. Against that background, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision on May 26 to grant a Special Operations Forces unit the honorary title “Heroes of the UPA” was genuinely painful from the Polish perspective. It reopened the most sensitive historical wound in a relationship that, despite recurring frictions over memory, has otherwise been defined by solidarity since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.