Poland’s Stunning Double Standard: Fascist Mussolini Awarded Poland’s Highest Honor. Zelenskyy Was Just Stripped of His

The man who marched on Rome and stood at Hitler’s side keeps his medal. The president of a nation bleeding to stop a Russian empire had his taken away. Let us call that what it is.

Last night, Polish President Karol Nawrocki finally made his move and stripped Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state decoration. And he wanted everyone to admire how reasonable he was being about it. “This decision is not directed against the Ukrainian people,” he announced. It “does not signify a change in the strategic direction of Polish security policy.” Poland had supported Ukraine, he assured us, and would go on supporting it, because Russian aggression endangers all of Europe.

It is one of the most hypocritical statements a European leader has made in years, and it deserves to be named as such.

Start with the lie at its center. The Order of the White Eagle was not pinned on Zelenskyy in 2023 as a personal favor to one man. It was awarded to the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian army — gratitude from one nation to another in the middle of a war for survival — and Zelenskyy accepted it on their behalf. That is what the award was for. That is what was said at the time. So when Nawrocki insists the revocation is “not directed against the Ukrainian people,” he is lying to your face: he has stripped a medal that belonged to the Ukrainian people, and he is daring them not to notice.

Now look at the company Nawrocki was so careful not to disturb. To this day, the Order of the White Eagle still belongs to Benito Mussolini — the fascist dictator of Italy, the man who marched on Rome, allied himself with Adolf Hitler, and dragged his country into the Axis. No one in Warsaw has ever found the nerve to take it back from him. It still belongs to Catherine II of Russia — the empress who tore Poland apart in the partitions and helped erase it from the map of Europe for more than a century. And it still belongs to Felix Dzerzhinsky — the founder of the Soviet secret police, the architect of the Red Terror. The empress who abolished Poland. The fascist who marched with Hitler. The man who built the Cheka. Not one of them troubles Karol Nawrocki’s conscience in the slightest.

But the president of the country fighting and dying right now to keep a Russian empire off Europe’s map — him, Nawrocki could not abide.

Read that sequence again and try to find the logic in it. There is none. There is only a double standard so brazen it should shame every official who rushed to defend it.

And if anyone imagines this is merely a dusty museum of old sins nobody got around to cleaning up, the list also still includes Gerhard Schröder — the former German chancellor and devoted servant of Gazprom and the Kremlin. Apparently a man on Moscow’s payroll clears Poland’s bar for honor. The name of a Ukrainian army unit does not.

Here is the principle Nawrocki trampled on his way to the moral pedestal: no state has the right to dictate the internal affairs of another sovereign state. International law even has a name for it — non-interference — and Ukraine has honored it scrupulously, including toward Poland. We have never presumed to tell Poles whom to honor, whom to mourn, or what to name their streets. That is not weakness. It is respect, the ordinary decency between neighbors.

Do you know who else makes a habit of dictating the internal affairs of other countries? Our neighbor to the east — the one that started this war against us. No, the two cannot be set side by side as equals; Russia’s version is incomparably more violent, and only a fool or a liar pretends Poland is Russia. But strip away the difference in scale and you find the same thing lying at the bottom of both: chauvinism. Russia’s is armed and genocidal. Poland’s arrives by press release and revoked medal. One is far worse. Both are chauvinism all the same — the same conviction that Ukraine’s choices are not really Ukraine’s to make.

If we wanted to behave the way Nawrocki behaves, we would have plenty to work with. We could demand that Poland tear down its monuments to Józef Piłsudski and rename every street that bears his name. Piłsudski signed an alliance with the Ukrainian People’s Republic — and then abandoned it at the Peace of Riga in 1921, recognizing Soviet rule over Ukraine and handing his ally to the very empire it had fought beside him to resist. It was Piłsudski’s state that later carried out the “Pacification” of Eastern Galicia, collective punishment visited on Ukrainian villages. By Nawrocki’s own logic, those streets should be torn up tomorrow.

But we do not demand it — not the statues, not the street signs, not a single one. Piłsudski belongs to Polish national memory. He is their hero, their history, their business, and we do not crawl into it to rearrange the furniture. We have more important things to do. There is a war on, and the enemy of both Poles and Ukrainians sits in Moscow, indifferent to which of us it manages to turn against the other first.

And since Volhynia will be raised — it always is — let us be honest about that too. The murders of Polish civilians were real. The graves are real. No decent Ukrainian denies them. And Ukraine has apologized, officially and more than once, precisely because we value good relations with our neighbors — the kind built on mutual respect, not the kind imposed from above with a whip and a list of conditions. There is a world of difference between honoring the dead and turning an entire alliance into a loyalty test, in which a nation at war must edit its own identity to a foreign country’s specifications before it is permitted its dignity.

Because that, finally, is what this is, beneath all the careful diplomatic wording. The president of Poland believes he is entitled to dictate Ukraine’s internal policy — which heroes we may honor, what our soldiers may be called, how we are allowed to remember our own dead. There is a precise word for that belief. It is chauvinism. And wrapping it in the ribbon of Poland’s highest honor does not turn it into anything else.

There is exactly one beneficiary of this entire spectacle, and it is neither Poland nor Ukraine. It is the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin has spent years trying to drive a wedge between Warsaw and Kyiv, and a Polish president has now driven it for him, free of charge — days before the two countries were to stand together in Gdańsk and host a conference on rebuilding Ukraine. Even Donald Tusk, whose government actually runs Polish foreign policy and whose approval this decision still requires, said the plain thing aloud: this pleases Putin. Ukraine’s own intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, handing back his own Polish decoration, called it exactly what it is — a gift to Moscow.

So Zelenskyy packed the medal into a parcel and sent it back through Nova Poshta, a courier slip standing in for the ceremony Warsaw no longer deserved. If this symbol may stay on the chests of Catherine, Mussolini, and Dzerzhinsky, he said, then Ukraine will not argue.

He should not argue. Let the eagle keep its empress, its fascist, and its executioner. Ukraine will keep what no Polish president can revoke and no Russian missile can erase: the right to name its own heroes, bury its own dead, and decide its own history — without asking permission from Warsaw, from Moscow, or from anyone else.

A people who have buried this many of their children to remain on the map do not need a medal to prove they belong in Europe.

They need allies honest enough to remember which empire is actually at the gate — and ashamed enough to stop handing it victories.