The council announced on Tuesday that 2027 would honour the UPA, its commander Roman Shukhevych and Oleh Olzhych, an activist of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), according to its website.
Speaking before departing for India on Wednesday, Tusk called the decision unwise and said such gestures undermine Ukraine's interests and make closer Polish-Ukrainian cooperation more difficult.
“Such demonstrations only harm Ukraine and greatly help all those who wish Ukraine ill,” he said.
Tusk said it was Ukraine's responsibility to address the decision. He urged Ukrainian partners in Kyiv to prevent such actions, warning that the decision could give opponents of Ukraine's EU accession a pretext to oppose it.
Poland's Deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Bosacki said Kyiv had assured Warsaw that the decision would not take effect.
Bosacki said on Wednesday that people close to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had made the promise. He described the decision as provocative and said the resolution's removal from the Lviv regional authorities' website late on Tuesday was a positive sign.
He added that Poland would hold Zelensky's office to its word.
Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski said he had signed a request to place Lviv councillor Sviatoslav Sheremeta on Poland's list of unwelcome persons.
In a post on X, Sikorski described Sheremeta as a reenactor of the Galizien Waffen-SS and the author of the proposal to designate 2027 as a year honouring Shukhevych. Sikorski also accused Shukhevych of ordering the expulsion and killing of Poles.
Poland regards the killings of Polish civilians as genocide. Many Ukrainian historians and politicians see them as part of a wider conflict in which both sides bore responsibility. In Ukrainian historical memory, the UPA and OUN are often regarded as symbols of the struggle for independence and of postwar resistance to Soviet rule.
Relations between Kyiv and Warsaw worsened after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky decided at the end of May to give the name “heroes of the UPA” to a military unit.
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Source: PAP