A deepening diplomatic rift between Poland and Ukraine over the memory of World War II-era massacres has drawn a rare joint intervention from senior Catholic leaders of both nations — and threatens to complicate Kyiv’s path toward the European Union.
In a joint appeal issued June 29, three Polish prelates — Cardinal Grzegorz Ryś, Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, and Cardinal Kazimierz Nycz — together with two Ukrainian Church leaders, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and Cardinal Mykola Bychok, urged both governments to pursue reconciliation, as EWTN News reported.
The bishops said they “are saddened to observe the growing tensions and resurgent hostility between Poles and Ukrainians.”
Echoing Pope Leo XIV, they called for a “disarmament of language,” arguing that words, symbols, and public gestures can either deepen divisions or foster peace.
The tensions revolve around wounded national sentiments over the contested memory of the Volhynia massacres during World War II.
Cause of diplomatic tensions
Poland and Ukraine have long-standing social and diplomatic tensions over their conflicting national narratives of World War II.
The current dispute began on May 26, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy named a military unit after the “heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).”
The UPA was a nationalist partisan formation that waged guerrilla warfare in the mid-1940s against Nazi Germany, Soviet-backed forces, and the underground Polish resistance movement.
Ukrainians view the UPA as a symbol of resistance to foreign occupation in the fight for national independence.
In Poland, however, it is associated with the Volhynia massacres, in which the UPA led the targeted slaughter and ethnic cleansing of around 100,000 ethnic Polish civilians, mostly women and children, from 1943 to 1945.
The campaign was driven largely by a nationalist effort to secure territory for a future Ukrainian state by removing the minority Polish population from lands that had belonged to prewar Poland but were claimed by Ukrainian nationalists. In the chaos of World War II, the UPA sought to ensure that Poland could not reassert control over the region after the war on the basis of the Polish minority living there.
Poland has officially recognized the Volhynia massacres as a genocide, a label Ukraine has rejected.
Diplomatic aftermath
In response to Zelenskyy’s decision to name a unit after the UPA, Polish President Karol Nawrocki on June 19 stripped the Ukrainian president of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state honor, which had been awarded to him in 2023.
An opinion poll published on the day Nawrocki announced his decision showed that 51% of Poles supported rescinding Zelenskyy’s honor, while only 36% were opposed. Among Nawrocki’s support base, 80% favored withdrawing the order.
In response and in solidarity with Zelenskyy, on June 21 three former Ukrainian presidents, along with various other government officials and diplomats, returned the state awards they had been given by Poland.
This was followed by Polish government officials on June 22 returning awards they had received from Ukraine.
Adding further fuel to the dispute were statements made in February, when Oleksandr Alfyorov, the head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance (UINR), described the Volhynia tragedy as “one of Poland’s state myths.”
Poland’s own Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) replied by declaring that “the Volhynia genocide is a documented fact” while criticizing the Ukrainian state for building elements of its identity on “the cult of individuals and organizations responsible for these crimes.”
The path toward reconciliation
The Polish and Ukrainian prelates also invoked the memory of St. John Paul II, most notably his words marking the 60th anniversary of the Volhynia massacres in 2003, in which he called for “Ukrainians and Poles not to remain enslaved by their sad memories of the past.”
The Polish pontiff also noted that Christians are called to acknowledge the errors of the past while needing the strength to “ask forgiveness for their own shortcomings” and to “forgive one another for the wrongs they have suffered.”
In that spirit, the prelates urged Poles and Ukrainians to “humbly ask for forgiveness and to courageously forgive” while extending “a hand of reconciliation” despite wounds that remain raw.
They also warned against pursuing narrow national interests, saying true reconciliation requires both nations to seek the common good rather than impose their own vision of history on the other.
Future implications
A day before the Church’s joint appeal for peace, Zelenskyy declared that “no one will dictate” to Ukraine which heroes the country honors as he announced plans for a national pantheon celebrating notable Ukrainians.
This was widely read in Poland as a hardening of Kyiv’s position, prompting warnings from politicians across the spectrum that the issue could spill over into Ukraine’s European Union ambitions.
That matters because Ukraine’s path into the European Union ultimately requires the consent of every member state, including Poland.
In the long term, Warsaw is likely to seek a clearer acknowledgment from Ukraine’s highest political levels of the scale and character of the Volhynia massacres and of the role played by the UPA.
With Zelenskyy unwilling even to remove the UPA name from a military unit and Nawrocki escalating the issue in turn, any workable compromise now appears more difficult to reach.
