President Volodymyr Zelensky will skip this year’s Ukraine Recovery Conference hosted in Poland, Kyiv announced Tuesday, amid a spiraling diplomatic spat between the allies and neighbors over World War II memory.
The annual event — which kicks off on Thursday in Gdansk — is due to gather business leaders and officials to discuss the post-war reconstruction of Ukraine, but has been overshadowed by weeks of squabbling over historical memory.
Poland’s nationalist president Karol Nawrocki stripped Zelensky of Warsaw’s highest honur — the White Eagle Order — last week.
That escalated tensions triggered when the Ukrainian president named a military unit after the WWII Ukrainian UPA insurgent army — seen in Poland as war criminals responsible for the massacre of thousands of Poles in western Ukraine’s Volyn region.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said Tuesday that she would lead Ukraine’s delegation at the conference, effectively confirming that Zelensky would not attend the event.
In Ukraine, many see the UPA partisans as heroes who fought for independence against Soviet, Nazi and Polish rule.
Zelensky symbolically returned the Polish award over the weekend and — in a show of solidarity — his predecessors Leonid Kuchma, Viktor Yushchenko and Petro Poroshenko also sent theirs back.
Over the weekend, the Ukrainian leader accused Poland’s political class of trying to score “political points” domestically and accused them of fuelling anti-Ukrainian sentiment.
Poland has been one of Ukraine’s main allies during the Russian invasion, now in its fifth year, taking in hundreds of thousands of refugees and turning into a logistics hub for western support for Kyiv. But there have been several waves of disputes between Kyiv and Warsaw over the WWII legacy. (AFP)
