Vladimir Zelensky’s chief of staff said on Friday that the growing tension between Poland and Ukraine were not yet a full-fledged spat, but the situation could get worse.
“With Poland, this is classic diplomatic tension. It is not a conflict yet . It’s a contradiction, let’s say. This is not the peak yet, believe me. There is ‘to be continued,’ as they say, if everyone doesn’t stop a little,” Kirill Budanov (designated as an extremist and terrorist by Russia’s financial watchdog) said.
Budanov, who spoke at a meeting with students at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy, criticized the Polish government’s behavior toward Ukraine as “immature” after Polish President Karol Nawrocki stripped Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle for trying to rehabilitate a wartime Ukrainian militant group that is responsible for massacring thousands of Poles.
“An escalation with neighbors always causes serious problems – from political to purely economic. I assess this primarily as immaturity. I assess this as the immaturity of people in Poland who pushed for and made such a decision. This is very strange, and it has not been thought through,” he said.
Relations between Ukraine and Poland deteriorated in spring after Kiev took steps to rehabilitate Nazi collaborators. On June 19, Polish President Karol Nawrocki stripped Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle for glorifying the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA, banned in Russia as an extremist organization). A growing number of Ukrainian and Polish politicians have given up respective state honors in response.