Poland cautiously welcomes Ukrainian plans to search for victims of WWII massacres

Poland’s foreign ministry has cautiously welcomed an announcement that Ukraine plans to search for the remains of victims of the Volhynia massacres, in which Ukrainian nationalists killed around 100,000 ethnic Poles during World War Two. The issue has been a major source of tension between the two allies.

“This is good news and a step in the right direction,” Polish foreign ministry spokesman Paweł Wroński told the Polish Press Agency (PAP). “But [foreign] minister Radosław Sikorski has repeatedly emphasised in talks with Ukrainian partners that we expect not plans, but decisions.”

On Tuesday, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINM) announced that it “plans to search for victims of the Volhynia tragedy in response to…requests from Polish citizens regarding the possibility of searching for and exhuming the remains of their family members”.

It added that, in particular, it plans to undertake such searches in 2025 in the Rivne region of western Ukraine in response to a request from one Polish citizen.

“When we receive the necessary clarifications from Polish citizens regarding the location of potential search sites, we will try to help them despite the war and difficult economic situation,” said UINM’s president, Anton Drobovych. He added that the Polish authorities would be granted observer status during the search.

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However, the UINM’s statement also included criticism of Poland. It noted that Ukraine’s culture ministry has chosen the Ukrainian members of a Ukrainian-Polish Working Group on National Memory agreed on by the two countries’ prime ministers at the start of this year.

But “no information regarding the formation of the Polish part of the working group has been received”, wrote the UINM. It also said that Poland was refusing requests from Ukraine to restore a memorial at a burial site of soldiers from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) on its territory.

This “leaves open the question of the readiness of the Polish side for parity and equal relations with Ukraine in the field of historical memory”, wrote the UINM.

The UPA was a paramilitary organisation that fought for Ukrainian independence during the war but was also responsible for the Volhynia massacres. Poland regards the massacres as a genocide but Ukraine rejects that description, and still honours many UPA figures.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, visited Warsaw this week for talks with President Andrzej Duda, the speakers of both houses of parliament, and Sikorski, with exhumations among the topics discussed.

“We discussed specific technical – not political – steps to finally resolve the issue of exhumations, which has been poisoning our political dialogue for a long time,” wrote Sybiha on social media after the meetings. “There should be no political obstacles.”

“It is nice to note that we have an understanding and a desire to move forward in a constructive direction,” he added. “The past, no matter how difficult it may be, cannot jeopardise the present response to common challenges and the future of the Euro-Atlantic family.”

Speaking to PAP, Wroński, the Polish foreign ministry spokesman, said that Sikorski also “treats this issue not as a political dispute, but calls on the Ukrainian side to make…a Christian gesture of remembrance towards the victims of the terrible events in Volhynia”.

“We hope that such a decision [to allow exhumations] will actually be made,” added Wroński.

Last year, Poland’s then prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said that he had received personal assurances from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Kyiv will permit the exhumation of victims of the Volhynia massacres.

In 2020, Zelensky and his Polish counterpart, Andrzej Duda, jointly declared a desire to “respect historical truth”, including allowing the exhumation of victims. In 2022, the Ukrainian authorities granted permission for exhumations in one village.

Last month, Sikorski called on Ukraine to allow exhumations as a mark of “gratitude for what Poland is doing for Ukraine today”, referring to the support Warsaw has provided to Kyiv during the ongoing war with Russia.

In July, a Polish deputy prime minister, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, said that Ukraine would not be allowed to join the European Union “if the Volhynia issue is not resolved”.

Speaking this week to broadcaster Polsat, Polish deputy foreign minister Władysław Teofil Bartoszewski said that the issue of “exhumations will certainly be raised” when Ukraine begins its first chapter of EU accession negotiations regarding the rule of law and administration of justice.

If “this chapter is not closed, Ukraine will not take a step further in the next chapters”, he added. “We are not blackmailing Ukraine, we are only saying that they must behave in accordance with what European rules require. We do not want revenge, we do not demand punishment, we just want a dignified burial of our ancestors.”

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.