Zelensky has promised Poland exhumations of WW2 massacre victims in Ukraine, says Polish PM

Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, says he has received personal assurances from President Volodymyr Zelensky that Ukraine will permit the exhumation of victims of the Volhynia massacres, in which Ukrainian nationalists killed tens of thousands of ethnic Polish civilians during World War Two.

“When I was in Kyiv, my last two visits, I spoke with President Zelensky about this,” said Morawiecki when asked about the exhumations, which have long been a sensitive and problematic issue between Poland and Ukraine.

“I have promises from their side that exhumations will finally be resumed,” he continued. “The Ukrainian president and government made such a promise.”

Between 1943 and 1945, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) led an ethnic cleansing operation that resulted in the deaths of up to 100,000 Poles. In Poland, the episode is widely regarded as a genocide, and has been recognised as such by parliament, but Ukraine rejects that description.

Last year, Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) estimated that the remains of around 55,000 ethnic Polish victims and 10,000 Jewish ones “still lie in death pits in Volhynia, waiting to be found, exhumed and buried”.

“The truth about the Volhynia massacres must be clarified,” said Morawiecki on Saturday. “We will not let it go, regardless of what is happening in Ukraine.”

In 2020, Zelensky 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).

Last November, the Ukrainian authorities granted permission for exhumations in one village. Earlier this month, an anonymous Polish government source told the Wprost weekly that they “expect the exhumation to begin in the spring”.

This year will see commemorations in Poland of the 80th anniversary of the start of the massacres.

Last month, Ukraine’s former ambassador to Poland, Andrii Deshchytsia, admitted that his country had not done enough to enable the exhumation of Polish victims of the Volhynia massacres.

“I am of the opinion that it is necessary to pay tribute to those who died, to bury them in a Christian way,” he told Radio Zet, noting that Russia’s war in Ukraine had made Ukrainians even more understanding of this need. But he added that sometimes the problem is convincing local politicians to allow exhumations.

Deshchytsia, who served as ambassador from 2014 until last year, also said there had been discussions on the Ukrainian side about creating a memorial site for victims of the massacres.

Speaking last week to the Polish Press Agency (PAP), Poland’s deputy culture minister Jarosław Sellin urged Poles to show patience on this issue.

“Patience is needed here; Ukraine is starting to apologise,” said Sellin. “Last year we had an unprecedented situation in which the Ukrainian ambassador to Poland, here in Warsaw, laid his wreath at the monument commemorating the Volhynia massacre, bowed his head and prayed.”

“The truth is that it was genocide, genocide by Ukrainian nationalists,” he continued. “But we must also look to the future in order to be able to conduct a dialogue with Ukrainians calmly about dealing with the past, about them finally recognising that it was genocide.”

However, while recent years have seen some progress towards reconciliation between Ukraine and Poland over their difficult history, there have also been moments of tension.

Last year, the Polish foreign ministry intervened after Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany denied that Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera was responsible for the mass murder of ethnic Poles and Jews and also sought to justify his collaboration with Nazi Germany.

A few months later, Polish government figures condemned as “unacceptable” the decision by Ukraine to appoint the same ambassador as a deputy foreign minister.

Main image credit: Leon Popek/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY-SA 3.0)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.