The Ukrainian authorities have granted permission for Polish specialists to search and exhume the graves of ethnic Poles killed by Ukrainian nationalists in one village during World War Two.
Their deaths were part of a wider series of massacres – regarded as a genocide in Poland – that have long been a source of tension between the two countries.
“The Ukrainian side informed us formally that exploration work in Ukraine with the participation of Polish specialists would be possible,” deputy foreign minister Marcin Przydacz told the Polish Press Agency (PAP).
“[This] is a big change from how the Ukrainian authorities previously approached the situation,” he added, “a step in a very good direction, showing that consistent dialogue and cooperation can lead to overcoming even such difficult decisions.”
His comments followed an announcement by the Freedom and Democracy Foundation, a Polish NGO, that it has received permission from Ukrainian authorities to search and exhume graves of Poles murdered by a branch of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in the village of Puzhnyky in February 1945.
The UPA was a Ukrainian nationalist partisan organisation that was the primary perpetrator of the massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia from 1943 to 1945 that killed as many as 100,000 ethnic Poles – mostly women and children – as well as Jews and other non-Ukrainian ethnic groups.
Most people in Poland regard the killings as an act of genocide, a position officially recognised by the Polish parliament. However, Ukrainian officials have rejected that term, and have also often pointed to historical persecution of ethnic Ukrainians by Poles.
Under President Volodymyr Zelensky, that position has softened somewhat. In 2020, he and his Polish counterpart, Andrzej Duda, jointly declared a desire to “respect historical truth”, including allowing the exhumation of victims (something that authorities in Ukraine had previously blocked).
In Puzhnyky (or Puźniki in Polish) – which is now in Ternopil Oblast of western Ukraine but before the war was part of Poland – Ukrainian nationalists are believed to have killed between 50 and 135 Poles on the night of 12/13 February 1945.
Przydacz told PAP that he hoped the “significant gesture” made by Ukraine in allowing exhumation in Puzhnyky “will enable future exhumations and the possibility of a dignified burial of Poles who lost their lives on Ukrainian territory in the 20th century, including during the Volhynia massacre”.
The minister noted that, since Russia’s invasion, Ukraine has been able to “count on all kinds of Polish support, humanitarian, financial and military”, and added that this cooperation has also seen us “make some progress on these difficult historical issues as well”.
Those old tensions were, however, stirred in June, when Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Andrii Melnyk, denied that Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera was responsible for the mass murder of ethnic Poles and Jews, and also sought to justify Bandera’s collaboration with Nazi Germany.
However, Ukraine’s foreign ministry distanced itself from Melnyk’s words and, soon after, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki declared on the anniversary of the massacres that Russia’s current war offers an opportunity for Poland and Ukraine to finally achieve reconciliation over the tragedy.
In the 30 years since Ukraine regained its independence, Polish institutions and activists have made many attempts to exhume and commemorate the victims of the massacres, but relatively few have been successful.
In 2017, the Ukrainian authorities banned the search for and exhumation of the remains of Polish victims of wars and conflicts on Ukrainian territory. The decision was made after the dismantling of a UPA monument in Poland in April that year, reported PAP.
Memorial plaque to the victims of the crimes committed against Polish citizens by the OUN (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists) and UPA, including the name of Puźniki/Puzhnyky (source: Glaube/Wikipedia Commons, under CC BY-SA 4.0)
Main image credit: Leon Popek/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY-SA 3.0)
Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.
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