Poland’s prime minister has announced a “breakthrough” concerning the first exhumations of Polish victims of World War II-era ethnic cleansing in what is now western Ukraine.
Donald Tusk posted on the X platform on Friday that there had been a breakthrough decision, without specifying details. The issue concerns the 1943–44 killing by Ukrainian nationalists of tens of thousands of Polish civilians, an event that has divided the two countries ever since.
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Poland considers the killings an act of organized genocide while Ukraine insists they occurred as part of a ‘symmetrical’ armed conflict.
The matter came to a head in 2017 when Kyiv banned exhumations being conducted by Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) in response to the dismantling of a monument in Poland commemorating the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA.
Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, and his Ukrainian counterpart, Andrii Sybiha, said after talks last November that the ban would be lifted and that there remained no obstacles to resuming exhumations.
On Friday, Tusk posted on X: “Finally, a breakthrough. There has been a decision on the exhumation of the first Polish victims of the UPA. I thank the culture ministers of Poland and Ukraine for [their] good cooperation. We await further decisions.”
A Polish culture ministry spokesperson said details of the decision would be made public in due course.
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Oleksiy Chernyshov, a Ukrainian deputy prime minister and minister for national unity, met Poland’s culture minister, Hanna Wróblewska, in Warsaw on Thursday, a day after an opposition Polish presidential candidate took aim at Kyiv over the dispute.
Karol Nawrocki, who heads the IPN, said in a TV interview that Ukraine had no place in NATO or the EU until it had resolved the issue as “a country that cannot answer for a very brutal crime against 120,000 of its neighbors cannot be part of international alliances.”
The comments drew condemnation from the Ukrainian foreign ministry, which described Nawrocki’s remarks as “biased and manipulative.”
A Polish foreign ministry spokesman said on Friday that the first exhumations would be “good for Polish-Ukrainian relations and for Ukraine itself.”
Paweł Wroński added that the move “serves Ukraine as a European nation.”
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha praised the progress on exhumation talks with Poland
“We respect one another and defend from Russian imperialism together. Each resolved bilateral issue is a blow to Moscow,” he wrote on the X platform on Friday.
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