Ukrainian President Will Not Attend Ukraine Recovery Conference in Poland

Ukraine's president will not attend a conference on postwar reconstruction of Ukraine that begins Thursday in the Polish coastal city of Gdańsk. The prime minister will lead the Ukrainian delegation instead. The annual conference, previously held in Rome, Berlin and London, seeks to bring together partners and businesses to help rebuild Ukraine after the war.

Background to the Dispute The decision follows tensions over the naming of a military unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a partisan formation that killed up to 100,000 Poles in the Volhynia region between 1943 and 1945. The area now lies in Ukraine.

In 2016, the Polish parliament adopted a motion calling the killings a genocide committed by Ukrainian nationalists. Polish underground forces killed 10,000 Ukrainians in reprisals, according to historians.

The Ukrainian president said service members chose the name themselves and that the president must support them. The president also warned that the dispute would weaken relations at a time of rising tensions with Russia. A Polish official said the position of the Ukrainian side did not change and that history should not be an obstacle to the future.

The official added that anyone proud of the murderers of women and children should not be surprised by the reaction. Poland has been one of Ukraine's closest allies since the full-scale invasion in 2022 and has hosted more than a million Ukrainians who fled the war.

It also serves as a logistics hub for deliveries to Ukraine. An EU spokesperson said only Russia would benefit from worsening relations between the two countries and expressed hope that the conference would still succeed.