"No one will ever tell us how to live, how to speak, whom to love, to whom to be grateful, and which heroes to honor", Zelensky said during celebrations marking Ukraine's Constitution Day.
The proposed pantheon would collect the names of "all heroes who in different eras and centuries fought for Ukraine", he said, to be permanently enshrined in the country's history.
The announcement came amid an ongoing dispute with Warsaw sparked by Zelensky's decision in late May to name a military unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, known by its Ukrainian acronym UPA. The move drew sharp criticism from Polish officials.
On June 19, Polish President Karol Nawrocki announced he was revoking Zelensky's Order of the White Eagle. Former Ukrainian presidents Leonid Kuchma, Viktor Yushchenko and Petro Poroshenko subsequently renounced their own Orders of the White Eagle, while several other senior Ukrainian officials relinquished Polish state decorations.
Days after the decoration dispute, Zelensky and Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha announced they would not attend the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Gdańsk; Ukraine's delegation was led instead by Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko.
The UPA remains a deeply contentious subject in Polish-Ukrainian relations. Polish historians say UPA units carried out coordinated attacks on some 150 Polish villages in Volhynia in July 1943, killing more than 50,000 civilians in what Poland classifies as genocide. Many Ukrainian historians and politicians view the same events as part of a broader mutual conflict, while in Ukrainian historical memory the UPA is widely seen as a symbol of the independence struggle and postwar resistance to the Soviet Union.
(jh)
Source: PAP