The Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Poland and Ukraine, Radosław Sikorski and Andrei Sybiha, adopted a joint statement in which Ukraine confirmed that there are no obstacles to conducting search and exhumation work on the remains of Polish victims of wars and conflicts on its territory.
At a press conference in Yerevan, President Andrzej Duda asked whether that means progress in Polish-Ukrainian talks and whether the government has succeeded. He emphasized that we could call it successful when the search and exhumation work began. He pointed out that he has been constantly and systematically discussing this topic with Ukraine's President, Volodymyr Zelensky, for some time now.
Since the spring of 2017, there has been an ongoing dispute between Warsaw and Kyiv over the ban on the search and exhumation of the remains of Polish victims of wars and conflicts on the territory of Ukraine introduced by the Ukrainian authorities. The ban was issued after the monument to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in Hruszowice was dismantled in April 2017.
Poland and Ukraine have been divided for many years by the memory of the role of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which in 1943-45 committed genocidal ethnic cleansing of approximately 100,000 Polish men, women and children. While for the Polish side, it was a condemnable crime of genocide (mass and organized), for the Ukrainians, it was the result of a symmetrical armed conflict for which both sides were equally responsible. Additionally, Ukrainians want to perceive the OUN and UPA only as anti-Soviet organizations (due to their post-war resistance to the USSR), and not anti-Polish organizations.
In 2017-2024, the Institute of National Remembrance submitted nine official general requests to the Ukrainian administration, including an agreement to conduct search and exhumation work in 65 locations. Some were approved, and work was carried out; consent was not given in other places, and some applications remained unanswered.
- Based on reporting by Wpolityce(.)pl
