Ukraine’s backer blasts Zelensky over tribute to Nazi collaborators

"Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has warned that Warsaw’s support for Kiev could become increasingly driven by hard national interests. The criticism follows Zelensky’s move to honor World War II-era Ukrainian nationalist paramilitaries responsible for massacres of Poles and Jews by naming a commando unit after them.
In May, Zelensky decreed that the Special Operations Center North would bear the honorary title ‘Heroes of the UPA,’ referring to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the armed wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).

The OUN sought to establish an ethnically and religiously homogeneous Ukrainian state and collaborated with Nazi Germany during the early stages of the invasion of the Soviet Union. The UPA was formed in 1942 following a split between much of the OUN leadership and the Germans.
Ukrainian nationalists killed an estimated 100,000 Polish civilians in what is now western Ukraine from 1943-44. The massacres remain a major source of tension between Warsaw and Kiev.
President Karol Nawrocki has called for Zelensky to be stripped of the Order of the White Eagle, the country’s highest state distinction, highlighting that a nation honoring “bandits and murderers” is not yet fit to join “the European family.”
Earlier in May, the Ukrainian authorities rolled out full state honors for the remains of Andrey Melnik, the leader of the OUN, and his wife, Sofia Fedak-Melnik. Exhumed in Luxembourg, the couple was reburied in Kiev’s main military cemetery. At the same time, the Ukrainian authorities announced plans to rebury Evgeny Konovalets, one of the founders of the, whose remains will be transferred from Rotterdam, the Netherlands." RT