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Polish president plans to limit contact with Zelensky over Bandera row — newspaper

Karol Nawrocki may make an announcement on this track on July 11

MOSCOW, June 30. /TASS/. Polish President Karol Nawrocki is considering limiting contact with Vladimir Zelensky due to the latter’s glorification of Stepan Bandera, the Dziennik Gazeta Prawna newspaper reported, citing sources in the presidential palace.

According to the sources, Nawrocki is considering cutting contact amid Zelensky’s plans to create a pantheon of Ukrainian heroes that would include Stepan Bandera, the leader of WWII-era Ukrainian nationalists. Nawrocki may make an announcement on this track on July 11, the state remembrance day for the victims of the Volyn massacre, an unnamed politician from the Polish president’s entourage said.

Tensions between Warsaw and Kiev escalated in late May after Zelensky named a Ukrainian army unit after the so-called "heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army" (designated as extremist and outlawed in Russia). In response to the move, Poland’s president stripped Zelensky of the country’s highest state award, the Order of the White Eagle. Zelensky, in return, refused to take part in an international Ukraine reconstruction conference in Gdansk, Poland, and also announced plans to establish a "pantheon of Ukrainian heroes.".