In the quiet, dignified halls of a Polish city council, a symbolic bomb was dropped this week. Volodymyr Zelensky, the wartime hero of Ukraine, was stripped of a municipal honour in the city of Olsztyn. The reason? A Ukrainian military unit, the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, nicknamed the “Galizien”, is being cited as a name on Kyiv’s list of permissible historical symbols. For Poles, the name is a knife in an old wound. For Ukraine, it is a desperate attempt to forge a national myth that can hold a fractured country together. And for the relationship between Kyiv and Warsaw, it is the most serious rupture since the war began.
Poland has been Ukraine’s most steadfast neighbour, a logistical hub for Western weaponry and a safe haven for millions of refugees. But history, as ever, is a serpent that can coil and strike at the least convenient moment. The honour removed from President Zelensky was not a personal insult. It was a political signal from a local government that refuses to whitewash the crimes of the SS Galizien division, a unit formed in 1943 under Nazi command and infamous for its role in the slaughter of Polish civilians in the village of Huta Pieniacka in 1944. To Ukrainians, the unit’s legacy is complicated, a product of a desperate fight for a free Ukraine against both Stalin and Hitler. To Poles, it is a simple, bloody fact.
This is not just a row about a unit name. This is about how nations remember war. Ukraine, fighting for its survival, is trying to build a pantheon of heroes that excludes Soviet ties and includes anyone who fought for an independent Ukraine, even if they fought alongside the wrong side. Poland, which lost millions of citizens to Nazi genocide and Soviet deportation, sees little room for moral equivalence. The Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance updated its list of “struggle for independence” symbols in 2023, including the Galizien division. Polish authorities, from the President to local councillors, cried foul.
On the streets of Lviv, I spoke to a history teacher named Oksana. “We cannot choose our ancestors,” she said, with tired eyes. “My grandfather was forced into that division. He was killed by the Nazis when he tried to desert. We do not celebrate the SS. We celebrate the idea that we were not just a Soviet republic.” In Warsaw, a retired Polish soldier named Marek told me: “Every time they try to glorify those who killed our people, it opens the wound. We are fighting side by side with Ukraine against Putin. But we cannot forget.”
The strain on Kyiv-Warsaw ties is real. Poland has not backed down on the issue, with the foreign ministry calling the Ukrainian stance “a huge disappointment”. President Zelensky’s office has so far remained cautious, aware that a public spat with Poland would be a gift to the Kremlin. But the genie is out of the bottle. The Olsztyn council’s move is a local action that has national reverberations. It suggests that Polish patience with selective Ukrainian memory is wearing thin.
What this episode reveals is the fragile architecture of solidarity when it is built on such different foundations of grief. Poland’s support for Ukraine is based on contemporary geopolitics: Putin is the common enemy. But the historical floorboards are rotten. Every time a Ukrainian official defends the Galizien name, every time a Polish mayor withdraws a civic honour, the cracks become visible. The human cost here is not just in the front line, but in the quiet thoughts of neighbours who have shared a border and a tragedy, but not a memory.
For now, both sides will try to patch it up. Zelensky needs Polish weapons. Poland needs a buffer state between it and Russia. But the cultural shift is palpable. The myth of untroubled brotherhood is over. History will not be buried, not even for a war. And in the streets of Olsztyn and Kyiv, the real battle is for the meaning of the past itself.
