The massacre of around 100,000 Polish civilians by Ukrainian paramilitary forces has long soured diplomatic relations between the otherwise close allies.
ADVERTISEMENTA decision was made to exhume the bodies of the victims of the massacre in Volhynia, said the Prime Minister of Poland, Donald Tusk.
“Finally, a breakthrough. A decision was made on the first exhumations of the Polish victims of the UPA. I would like to thank the Ministers of Culture of Poland and Ukraine for their good cooperation. We await further decisions,” Tusk wrote in a post on X.
In 1943, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) carried out a series of massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in then German-occupied Poland, resulting in the deaths of approximately 100,000 Polish civilians. People of other nationalities were also massacred, including Armenians, Jews, Russians, Czechs, Georgians, historians say.
The UPA was an ethnic Ukrainian paramilitary force that collaborated with Nazi Germany.
The tragedy has long been a point of contention between the two countries, causing friction between the otherwise close allies. While Poland officially recognizes the massacre as genocide, Ukraine disputes this characterization, considering it a conflict for which both sides are responsible. Ukrainian officials said both the UPA and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) were part of the resistance to the communist Soviet Union.
Many in Poland have advocated the exhumation of some 55,000 Polish and 10,000 Jewish victims who, according to Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), “still lie in the death pits of Volhynia, waiting to be found, exhumed and buried.”
In June last year, the Deputy Prime Minister of Poland, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, said in an interview with Polsat television that “Ukraine will not join the European Union if the issue of Volhynia is not resolved.”
“We want Ukraine to develop, but we cannot leave unattended a wound that has not healed,” he said in an interview, “Questions related to the genocide in Volhynia remain unresolved.”
This week, Karol Nawrocki, a presidential candidate backed by the conservative opposition Pravo i Pravda (PiS) party, made a similar statement.
“Currently, I do not imagine Ukraine in either the European Union or NATO until the important civilizational issues for Poland are resolved,” said Nawrocki, who is currently the head of the Institute of National Remembrance.
The INR is the state investigative body responsible for investigating archival crimes against Poland that occurred during World War II and the communist period that followed.
“A country that is unable to explain a very brutal crime against 120,000 of its neighbors cannot be part of international alliances,” Nawrocki added.
Responding to Tusk’s announcement at X, Nawrocki said the news of the exhumations was “great news” if confirmed. “We (INR) have been fully prepared and determined for years,” he said, “waiting for official information and starting to fulfill our obligations to Poland.”
The latest iteration of the dispute began in 2017, when Ukraine banned the search and exhumation of Polish victims on its territory, following the removal of a UPA monument in Hruszowice, Poland.
Since then, efforts have been made in both countries to reduce these tensions and overcome historical traumas.
ADVERTISEMENTIn July 2023, Presidents Andrzej Duda and Volodymyr Zelenskyy jointly marked the 80th anniversary of the massacre during a commemorative mass in Lutsk, northwestern Ukraine.
During the service, the two leaders walked side by side, acknowledging the shared trauma that had occurred in the region.
However, in a public opinion survey conducted by the Mieroszewski Center, the percentage of Ukrainians who have a good opinion of Poles decreased from 67% to 44.5% in the past year. When asked to identify the causes of the differences between the two countries, 26% blamed the grain crisis and border blockades, while 19% blamed the ongoing tensions over the massacre in Volhynia.
Officials on both sides hope that Tusk’s announcement and a formal agreement on the exhumations will help ease tensions and end strained relations.
ADVERTISEMENT“We respect each other and stand together against Russian imperialism,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha wrote on X after Tusk’s announcement: “Any agreement in UA-PL relations is a blow to Moscow.
