Nawrocki moves to ban OUN-UPA symbols in Poland, drawing a red line through wartime memory politics

Poland's freshly installed president Karol Nawrocki used an address on 11 July 2026 to call for an outright ban on the symbols of the OUN-UPA and on the red-and-black flag associated with the wartime Ukrainian nationalist movement, declaring that such emblems have no place on Polish territory. The intervention lands barely a month after Nawrocki took office, and it puts the head of state on a direct line against a sector of Ukrainian civil society and diaspora politics that has, until now, enjoyed a degree of quiet tolerance in parts of western and northern Poland.

The dispute is older than the current war. For years, Polish-Ukrainian relations have been a careful trade between strategic alignment against Russia and an open wound over the wartime mass killings in Volhynia and eastern Galicia, where the OUN-UPA commanded partisan formations responsible for the deaths of an estimated tens of thousands of Polish civilians between 1943 and 1945. The flag Nawrocki named is the same banner that still appears at commemorations in parts of western Ukraine and among diaspora communities in Canada, Britain and Australia. The political question is not whether the violence happened, but how a state allied to Kyiv should treat its iconography in 2026, when Russian missiles are falling on Ukrainian cities and Warsaw is one of Kyiv's loudest advocates in the European Union.

What the president is actually demanding

Nawrocki's framing, as captured by Ruptly's pool footage on 11 July, was direct: "We don't want to see this flag in Poland, and I will do everything to prevent it from being here." That is the language of executive intent rather than parliamentary draft. In Poland's constitutional order, a president cannot unilaterally criminalise a symbol. The Penal Code's Article 256 already outlaws the propagation of fascist, communist and other totalitarian symbolism, and prior governments have used it sporadically against Soviet and Nazi iconography; whether the OUN-UPA flag falls under that provision is a question the courts have answered inconsistently over the past two decades. Nawrocki's move is therefore best read as a political demand on his own parliamentary allies and on the public prosecutor's office, backed by the moral weight of the presidency.

The red-and-black banner is, in formal terms, the flag of the UPA's military wing, not of the OUN political organisation, and Ukraine's own Institute of National Remembrance has spent years walking a careful line between honouring UPA veterans as anti-Soviet partisans and distancing the modern state from the ethnic-cleansing campaigns of 1943-45. That distinction has not spared Warsaw the recurring headache of marches in Przemyśl, where local Ukrainian communities have periodically held commemorations that draw counter-demonstrations from Polish nationalist organisations and quiet diplomatic protests from the Foreign Ministry in Kyiv.

The line Nawrocki is drawing, and what it costs

Polish-Ukrainian relations since 24 February 2022 have rested on a particular bargain. Warsaw supplies military hardware, hosts millions of Ukrainian refugees, pushes for EU accession and amplifies Kyiv's case in Brussels and Washington. In return, both governments have agreed, largely through omission, not to litigate the Volhynia question in the foreground of day-to-day diplomacy. The 2016 ban on exhumations of Polish victims of the Volhynia massacres, imposed by Kyiv and lifted in stages, remains a sore point but is no longer the central organising fact of the bilateral relationship.

Nawrocki's intervention pulls that bargain back into the open. It is not, on its face, an anti-Ukrainian act; the president's stated reason is the protection of Polish victims' memory, not a critique of Kyiv's war effort. But the practical effect, if the demand is met, is the criminalisation of symbols that a NATO neighbour's legislation treats as historical honour rather than criminal association. The Ukrainian side, in past iterations of this fight, has framed such bans as historical revisionism that effectively rehabilitates Soviet-era narratives of the OUN as collaborators rather than resistance fighters. That framing is contested inside Ukraine itself, where Lviv and Kyiv read the wartime movement very differently, but it is the framing that will travel to Warsaw through the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry's first response.

The legal lane and the political lane

The most likely next step is a bill submitted by Nawrocki's political allies in the Sejm, the lower house, to amend the Penal Code or pass a dedicated statute explicitly listing OUN-UPA insignia alongside swastikas, Soviet hammers-and-sickles and other banned totalitarian symbols. The parliamentary mathematics matter: the ruling coalition led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk's Civic Coalition has been cautious on this file, in part because parts of its own centre-left base include Ukrainian- and Lemko-origin voters with strong feelings on the opposite side. The opposition Law and Justice party, with which Nawrocki is loosely aligned, has long favoured a harder line on Ukrainian nationalism. A compromise, in the form of a narrower bill limited to specific insignia rather than broad symbolism, is the modal outcome.

There is also a judicial route. Polish prosecutors have, in scattered cases over the past decade, charged individuals under Article 256 for displaying UPA flags at public marches, but convictions have been uneven and several have been overturned on appeal on the grounds that the symbol's historical context was not fascist in the strict sense intended by the law. A presidential intervention, if it produces guidance to the prosecutor-general, would not by itself change that jurisprudence; it would, however, signal which cases the state considers worth pursuing.

What the move tells us about the new presidency

Nawrocki won the June 2025 election on a platform that put historical memory at its centre, and his first weeks in office have been a study in signalling rather than legislating. He has used speeches, not bills, to set the boundaries of what he considers acceptable in Polish public life. The UPA demand fits that pattern. It tells his base, which includes the survivors of Volhynia-era mass killings and their descendants, that the presidency will not treat the question as settled. It tells Kyiv that the wartime memory file remains live. It tells Brussels that Poland's Ukrainian policy has domestic limits that will be enforced.

The risk for Warsaw is that the move is read in Kyiv, and in the Ukrainian diaspora, as a downgrade of Poland's commitment at a moment when the front line in the Donbas is under renewed pressure and Ukraine is once again asking European partners for sustained ammunition deliveries. The Ukrainian ambassador to Poland has, in past cycles of this dispute, been recalled for consultations; the Polish foreign minister has, in past cycles, been summoned to the Sejm to explain why Warsaw tolerates marches in Przemyśl. The script is familiar. The question is whether the new president has the political capital to make this iteration stick, or whether the demand fades, as several previous ones have, into the long queue of Polish symbolic politics.

What is not yet clear is whether the Ukrainian government will respond through the foreign ministry, the Verkhovna Rada, or the public statements of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's office, and whether any response will be calibrated to the Polish public mood or pitched at a domestic Ukrainian audience. The sources reviewed for this article do not contain a Ukrainian official response dated 11 July; that response, when it comes, will determine whether this becomes a row or a footnote.

This article covers a developing symbolic-politics dispute with direct bearing on Poland's relationship with a war-time ally. Monexus has treated the Polish president's statement as a primary input and framed the Ukrainian side, where relevant, through its public position on the wartime OUN-UPA. Wire services carrying the pool footage have not, as of publication, named a Ukrainian counter-statement; this desk will update when one is filed.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/ruptlyalert