The diplomatic row over Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to name a top military unit in honour of the Ukrainian Liberation Army (UPA) that led Polish President Karol Nawrocki to strip the Ukrainian head of state of Poland’s highest honour has now led to Zelensky skipping the Ukraine Recovery Conference (URC) being hosted by Polish PM Donald Tusk.
The conference, taking place on June 25–26 in Gdańsk and co-hosted by Warsaw and Kiev, aims to boost international support and investment for Ukraine’s reconstruction.
In July last year, Poland was named as the host of URC for 2026. Since Russia’s invasion in 2022, the annual conference has always been held outside Ukraine. Previous hosts include London, Berlin and Rome.
Zelensky did not announce the decision to snub Poland over the URC himself, it was done by Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko who confirmed on June 24 that she would be leading Ukraine’s delegation in Gdańsk.
“I am leading Ukraine’s delegation and our overall work at the Ukraine Recovery Conference 2026 in Gdańsk,” wrote Svyrydenko on social media, referring to the Polish city where the event is being held.
“Ukraine respects its partners and builds cooperation on the principle of mutual respect,” she added, without making any direct reference to the ongoing diplomatic crisis. “Thank you to everyone who stands with us and helps make this work possible.”
She also expressed hope that the conference, which is dedicated to Ukraine’s defence against Russian aggression and reconstruction once the war finishes, would “secure concrete agreements that will strengthen Ukraine’s defence capabilities and resilience while expanding economic cooperation with our partners”.
Ukraine’s move comes as a blow to Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk who leads Poland’s centre-left government. Tusk had met Zelensky in Brussels last week and had hoped that the fact that he had avoided inviting Nawrocki to the URC plus the fact that he had criticized the Polish President’s action would be enough to persuade Zelensky to attend the event.
Poland has since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 acted as a hub for international military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine and continues to hope that its companies will in future have a major role to play in the reconstruction of the country after the war ends.
This is increasingly unlikely as the number of disagreements between Poland and Ukraine is intensifying. The most bitter of the disagreements relates to Ukraine’s insistence on honouring the UPA as heroes who fought against the USSR.
In Poland the UPA is associated with the Volhynia massacres, in which the military wing of the Ukrainian nationalist movement (OUN) led the slaughter of more than 100,000 ethnic Polish civilians, mostly women and children. Poland regards those events as a genocide, though Ukraine strongly rejects that characterisation of the event.
After Zelensky announced the honouring of UPA, Nawrocki warned that he would consider removing from Zelensky Poland’s highest state honour, the Order of the White Eagle, and three weeks later when the Ukrainian President refused to reconsider his decision Nawrocki made good on his threat.
That in turn prompted an angry response from Ukraine, where a number of senior officials, as well as three former presidents, also returned their own Polish honours in solidarity with Ukraine’s leader.
Zelensky rejected suggestions the dispute stemmed from Ukraine’s actions, saying on Sunday that Nawrocki was motivated by domestic politics.
“I see this purely as an electoral process,” Zelensky told Ukraine’s TSN news programme. “It has nothing to do with us – it’s an internal matter for them.”
The Ukrainian leader said Kiev had sought to ease tensions, including by proposing a bilateral meeting and sending senior officials to Warsaw for talks, but concluded that Nawrocki intended to withdraw the honour regardless.
Nawrocki’s chancellery refutes that interpretation arguing that it was expecting Zelensky to make a move to sooth ruffled Polish feathers but the Ukrainian President for three weeks did not find the time even to call Nawrocki.
Marcin Przydacz, the head of Nawrocki’s chief foreign affairs aide, also accused Ukrainian officials of “ingratitude” toward Poland and rejected suggestions from Kiev that Warsaw’s stance was pro-Russian, calling such claims “insolent”.
He said Ukraine had also pulled out of a planned meeting between the two presidents in Warsaw, proposing a much later date instead.
Tusk attempted to calm the situation by saying both Presidents should work out a compromise and saying that such disputes between Poland and Ukraine help only the Russians.
But even the absence of Nawrocki at the URC in Gdansk did not persuade Zelensky to attend but certainly managed to create yet another row between the Tusk government and Nawrocki.
“The President is not going to an event to which he has not been invited by Prime Minister Donald Tusk. Neither are any of his subordinate officials going due to the lack of invitations,” Przydacz told the media.
The Polish government however argued that the President had not been invited due to “the format of the event” and because “the presidential palace also showed no interest in participating”.
The Ukrainians are the co-organisers of the event but have washed their hands of the dispute over the lack of invite for Nawrocki saying that this was purely a Polish matter.
While there is popular support for Nawrocki’s action against Zelensky with over 50 per cent in favour, however a significant minority takes the view expressed on YouTube broadcaster Kanał Zero by senior commentator Jan Rokita.
The commentator has argued that he sees “only disadvantages for Poland of this dispute with Zelensky” and that it will lead to Ukraine to “act against Poland on the international stage”.
However, other commentators, such as Łukasz Warzecha from the weekly Do Rzeczy argue that Poland was foolish to have given so much aid to Ukraine in 2022 and 2023 without attaching at least some strings.
“Unconditional assistance was naive and foolhardy”, says Warzecha, adding that “Ukraine simply took Polish generosity as a given since there were no conditions attached.”
The two countries have since 2023 clashed over Ukrainian grain and road haulage exports and Poland has warned that the dispute over Volhynia and the role of the UPA could delay Ukraine’s accession to the EU.
Poland is also unhappy about the way it has been excluded from talks on a potential peace process held between Ukraine, Germany, France and the UK, with PM Tusk warning that Poland would not automatically support the outcomes from such talks.
However, Ukraine in turn is unhappy with Poland’s firm decision that it will not send any troops to a future peace keeping mission in Ukraine, in contrast to the position of the UK and France who have offered such military support.
Poland argues that its role is to continue to be the hub for assistance to Ukraine and to use its forces to patrol the eastern flank of NATO on its borders with the Baltic states, the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and Russia’s ally Belarus.
The country’s officials in private briefings also make clear that any Polish military involvement in peacekeeping in Ukraine would create space for Russia to claim Poland was attempting to recover land it had lost to Ukraine as part of the post-Second World War settlement.
