Volodymyr Zelenskyy will not attend the Ukraine Recovery Conference (URC 2026) in Gdańsk on June 25–26, The Guardian reported on June 23, with First Deputy Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko set to lead the Ukrainian delegation in his place.

The absence is a direct consequence of a bilateral rupture that has escalated sharply over the past two weeks. On June 19, Polish President Karol Nawrocki revoked Zelenskyy's Order of the White Eagle — Poland's highest state distinction — citing Ukraine's decision to name a military unit after a World War II-era organization with a deeply contested history in Polish memory, according to Reuters and AP News. The following day, Zelenskyy and senior Ukrainian officials returned their own Polish decorations, Al Jazeera reported — a reciprocal gesture that closed off any quiet diplomatic off-ramp.

The timing is pointed. URC 2026 is co-hosted by Poland and Ukraine, meaning Nawrocki's revocation — and now Zelenskyy's non-attendance — land squarely on a stage designed to project allied solidarity around Ukraine's postwar reconstruction. Warsaw and Kyiv had planned to stand together before donor governments and multilateral institutions. Instead, the conference opens with the Ukrainian head of state pointedly absent from a forum held in his country's name.

The Historical Fault Line

The naming dispute taps into one of the most entrenched and politically sensitive fractures in Polish-Ukrainian relations: the legacy of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and its role in the mass killing of ethnic Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia during 1943–44. Polish historians and official Polish memory treat these events as a genocide; Ukrainian historical and political culture tends to frame the UPA primarily through its resistance to Soviet and Nazi occupation. The gap between those framings has never been bridged institutionally, and it flares whenever either government touches the symbolism.

BBC News flagged the initial confrontation as early as June 10, when Warsaw threatened to strip the honour before Nawrocki formally acted nine days later. The speed of the escalation — threat to revocation to counter-return of awards in under two weeks — reflects how little political buffer now exists between the two governments on this file.

What It Means for the Conference

The practical reconstruction agenda in Gdańsk is substantial and largely insulated from the bilateral row: pledges from the EU, G7 members, and international financial institutions, coordination on infrastructure, energy, and private-sector investment frameworks. Svyrydenko, who oversees economic policy, is a credible principal for those negotiations. Ukraine's reconstruction needs run into hundreds of billions of dollars, and donor governments have strong independent incentives to keep that process moving regardless of the Polish-Ukrainian diplomatic weather.

But symbolism is not separable from diplomatic function at a conference of this architecture. The URC format is partly a signalling exercise — demonstrating international commitment to a sovereign Ukraine's future — and Zelenskyy's physical presence has been a consistent element of that signal at previous editions. His absence does not derail the technical work, but it hands critics of Western reconstruction efforts a ready-made narrative of disarray, and it complicates Poland's role as co-host.

For Nawrocki, the revocation was domestically legible: Polish public opinion on the Volhynia massacres is intense, and a newly installed president had little political room to absorb the unit-naming without a visible response. But the sequencing — acting six days before a conference Poland is co-hosting — suggests either an underestimation of Kyiv's willingness to escalate in kind, or a calculation that domestic political credibility outweighed conference optics.

Zelenskyy's decision to stay away rather than attend under the current conditions follows a similar logic. Appearing in Gdańsk now, with the Order of the White Eagle publicly revoked and his own decorations returned, would read as an acceptance of terms his government has explicitly rejected.

Where the relationship goes from here depends partly on whether either capital judges the current posture sustainable over a longer reconstruction horizon — one in which Polish political support, infrastructure corridors, and bilateral trust will all carry operational weight.