{"id":7207,"date":"2026-07-01T20:52:40","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T20:52:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/?p=7207"},"modified":"2026-07-03T13:47:36","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T13:47:36","slug":"why-ukraines-most-loyal-sponsor-is-growing-tired-of-kiev","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/01\/why-ukraines-most-loyal-sponsor-is-growing-tired-of-kiev\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Ukraine\u2019s most loyal sponsor is growing tired of Kiev"},"content":{"rendered":"

Poland\u2019s dispute with Ukraine reveals a deeper rift shaped by history, refugee fatigue and growing public frustration<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Something unusual has happened in Poland. In a country that has spent the past several years presenting itself as one of Ukraine\u2019s most committed patrons, a very different tone is beginning to break through.<\/p>\n

The immediate trigger was the latest quarrel over honors and historical memory. Polish President Karol Nawrocki revoked Vladimir Zelensky\u2019s Order of the White Eagle over the glorification of Nazi collaborators. Former Ukrainian presidents Leonid Kuchma, Viktor Yushchenko and Pyotr Poroshenko, together with a number of other Ukrainian public figures, responded by handing back their Polish decorations.<\/p>\n

On the surface, this looks like another symbolic dispute in Eastern Europe\u2019s endless war of medals, orders, and historical grievances. In reality, it points to something deeper: Poland is growing tired of Ukraine.<\/p>\n

This would be easier for Kiev to dismiss if it came only from the conservative camp given that Nawrocki belongs to the Law and Justice milieu, the party of churchgoers and national conservatives. Prime Minister Donald Tusk, meanwhile, has tried to hold the pro-Ukrainian line, warning that Poland has invested too much money and political capital to start quarreling now.<\/p>\n

\n Read more<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n \"RT
Ukraine\u2019s Nazi problem is no longer possible to ignore<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But the argument is no longer confined to party politics. Polish public opinion has shifted. What was whispered privately is now being said openly: for many Poles, Ukraine isn\u2019t an ally of the heart but a burden imposed by Washington and Brussels.<\/p>\n

Personally, I have never met a Pole who seriously believed Russia was about to attack Poland, and I\u2019ve known quite a few Poles. I was even married to one. In Poland, the constant warnings of a Russian invasion are usually heard not as a real assessment of danger, but as a pretext for armaments and American purchases.<\/p>\n

Law and Justice helped start that race with Patriot batteries, American visits, universal military training in schools, and endless talk of an eastern threat. Then the public tired of it and the party lost power when Tusk returned through coalition maneuvering. The conservatives understood the signal and began to adjust. Whereas yesterday it was Kamala Harris and air-defense contracts, today it\u2019s accusations that Zelensky\u2019s Ukraine honors Nazi collaborators.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also an embarrassment here because Poland has spent heavily on American weapons, including Patriot systems under the Vistula program. Deliveries are due to begin in 2027, yet the war has already shown the limitations of such systems against modern Russian missiles and drones, which is politically awkward. But the issue is bigger than money.<\/p>\n

\n Read more<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n \"RT
The bloody ghost behind Ukraine\u2019s fight with Poland<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At the heart of the matter is something Western commentary prefers not to discuss: many Poles simply don\u2019t like Ukrainians. This isn\u2019t a new irritation caused by benefits or wartime fatigue; it\u2019s older and deeper and it comes from history, memory, class, religion, land and blood.<\/p>\n

For Poles, Ukrainians were long seen as the peasant population of lands Poland considered its own. To Ukrainians, Poles were the former masters \u2013 arrogant, Catholic, imperial, and cruel. These attitudes didn\u2019t vanish because Brussels printed posters about European solidarity, but they were pushed beneath the surface until the war brought them back.<\/p>\n

The refugee wave made the old resentment visible again as millions of Ukrainians arrived in Poland, many of them from western and central Ukraine and not from the front line. They received support, housing, welfare and sympathy, but by 2023 many Poles had begun asking a blunt question: why are we paying for people who fled their own country while our government buys weapons for the war they avoided? That\u2019s where sympathy began to curdle.<\/p>\n

For Poland, Ukraine isn\u2019t only the victim presented in Western newspapers, it\u2019s also Volhynia, Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, the massacres of Polish civilians and the refusal of Ukrainian political culture to repent properly for crimes that live on in Polish family memory.<\/p>\n

\n Read more<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n \"RT
Vadim Zagorenko: Why Slavs can\u2019t stop fighting each other<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This matters more than Western diplomats understand. Poland can be ordered to support Ukraine and it can be paid and pressured into doing so, but it can\u2019t be made to forget what Ukrainian nationalists did to Poles in the territories that Poland still remembers as its own lost east.<\/p>\n

The numbers are disputed, as they always are in this part of Europe, and while Polish losses in the Polish-Soviet War were heavy, but they weren\u2019t on the scale of what Poles remember from Volhynia. Estimates for the massacre vary widely, from tens of thousands to well over 100,000 Polish civilians killed and even if modern Western accounts often push the figures down, Polish memory doesn\u2019t work that way because it remembers villages, churches, families and graves.<\/p>\n

It also remembers the role played by Ukrainian auxiliaries in Nazi terror, including in the liquidation of ghettos. This is why the argument over Zelensky and historical symbols has such force. It touches the nerve of Polish memory.<\/p>\n

Russia, by contrast, isn\u2019t always perceived in Poland in the way NATO press releases imagine. Yes, there is anti-Russian sentiment and fear, suspicion, and resentment. But for many ordinary Poles, the immediate problem of recent years hasn\u2019t been Russia, it\u2019s been Ukraine, Ukrainian historical politics, Ukrainian demands, Ukrainian migrants, and the sense that Poland is expected to give and give while receiving little gratitude in return.<\/p>\n

\n Read more<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n \"RT
\u2018Poles, Russians, and Jews must be exterminated\u2019: The bloody history of Zelensky\u2019s heroes (DISTURBING CONTENT)<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There\u2019s another layer too. Poland\u2019s deeper historical anxiety has often been Germany and since the early 2000s, German influence in former German territories has been watched with suspicion. Property disputes and Berlin\u2019s confident tone have all fed old fears and this is why Warsaw\u2019s reparations rhetoric isn\u2019t just populism, but also a response to the belief that Germany is slowly reasserting influence where Poland feels historically vulnerable.<\/p>\n

And so Poland is caught between the two burdens of pressure from the West to serve as Ukraine\u2019s rear base, and its own unresolved historical instincts and that tension couldn\u2019t last forever.<\/p>\n

The old Polish military song says:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cOnce we\u2019ve explored Warsaw, we\u2019ll be in a hurry
<\/em>To see our old Vilnius.
<\/em>The road from Vilnius is already ready,
<\/em>It leads straight on to Lviv.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In 2014, at a NATO event in Lodz, Polish volunteers even sang a version in which the road from Vilnius led \u201cto the heart, to Rus\u2019, to Kiev.\u201d<\/em> Kiev remained silent then, but perhaps it should have listened.<\/p>\n

Poland gave up formal claims to western Ukraine in order to enter the Euro-Atlantic world and in return, it was expected to support Ukraine politically and financially. For a while, it did, but the old grievances didn\u2019t disappear but were merely buried under slogans about solidarity.<\/p>\n

Now they are resurfacing as the Polish public increasingly sees aid to Ukraine not as a moral mission but as a yoke placed on its shoulders by America and the European Union. Ukrainians were welcomed and funded, but, in return, many Poles feel they received arrogance and contempt.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why the current dispute matters because it\u2019s about the end of an illusion. Poland and Ukraine were never natural brothers, but temporary partners under Western management and that arrangement is beginning to crack.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

This article was first published by the online newspaper\u00a0Gazeta.ru<\/a>\u00a0and was translated and edited by the RT team<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Poland\u2019s dispute with Ukraine reveals a deeper rift shaped by history, refugee fatigue and growing public frustration Something unusual has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7180,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7207"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7207"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7209,"href":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7207\/revisions\/7209"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}