“The president’s decision was entirely justified. I fully support it,” said PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński, commenting on Karol Nawrocki’s decision to strip Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle.
On Friday, President of the Republic of Poland Karol Nawrocki announced that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had been stripped of the Order of the White Eagle. The reason given for the decision was Zelensky’s move to name one of the units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces after the “heroes of the UPA.”
In response to Nawrocki’s decision, the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, Kyrylo Budanov, his deputy Ihor Zhovkva, and Ukraine’s ambassador to Poland, Vasyl Bodnar, renounced their Polish orders of merit.
Politicians from the Civic Coalition have criticized the president, suggesting that his decision was made to the benefit of the Kremlin.
The matter was commented on by PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński on TV Republika. Kaczyński took part in the Congress of “Gazeta Polska” Clubs in Sulejów.
“Well, this is their usual narrative. They have now decided to turn everything upside down – they, the ‘reset people,’ the people who covered up the attack on the President of the Republic of Poland and 95 other people […] with various lies and with a complete capitulation to reality, to the facts, and to Russia,”
he said.
He continued by saying that “today they want to portray us as Russia’s people, because they know that the power of propaganda can indeed be enormous, and that people can believe complete nonsense.” “I am deeply convinced, however, that there is such a thing as the accumulation of experience, the experience of society, and that this time they will not succeed,” he stated.
“The president’s decision was entirely justified. I fully support it. We cannot keep tolerating something that no sovereign state can tolerate, namely a lack of any response, even the kind of response that is possible today, because we cannot save the lives of those people anymore. We can only find them and bury them with dignity. And of course, we cannot agree to their murderers being treated as heroes in Ukraine today,”
he said.
He also recalled what he once told former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko: “Remember, with Banderism and with all these crimes, you will not enter the European Union, you will not enter NATO, because even if necessary, we ourselves will stop you.”
Referring to the issue of other representatives of the Ukrainian administration returning their decorations, he said that “an order crisis is not the gravest kind of crisis.” “Let them return them if they want to align themselves with a bad cause,” he said.