In a statement posted on its website, the ministry said the decision followed a request submitted on February 16 and concerns efforts to locate burial sites of residents who died during the war.
The searches will be carried out by a joint Ukrainian-Polish expedition tasked with identifying the precise burial locations.
If human remains are found, the work will proceed to exhumations and reburial, the ministry said.
The decision is based on arrangements made by a Ukrainian-Polish working group on historical memory, the ministry added.
The agreements were reflected in a joint statement summarising the group’s work in 2025 and were reaffirmed during a December 19 meeting in Warsaw between Polish President Karol Nawrocki and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky.
The ministry said further projects are planned this year in both countries.
Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) said the decision ends nearly seven years of efforts to obtain permission to search for the graves of victims of the massacre in Huta Pieniacka.
The IPN said it had worked closely with families of the victims, including members of the Huta Pieniacka Association.
Polish presidential spokesman Rafał Leśkiewicz said on X that Ukraine’s decision to allow search and exhumation work was a tangible result of the December meeting between the two presidents.
Huta Pieniacka, which no longer exists, has become a symbol in Poland of the wartime killings of ethnic Poles in the Volhynia region and eastern Galicia.
On February 28, 1944, about 850 Polish residents of the village were killed, according to findings by Polish prosecutors.
Investigators say the massacre was carried out by a unit of the 14th Waffen-SS Division Galizien, under German command, with the participation of Ukrainian nationalist forces.
The village was subsequently destroyed.
The killings were among a series of massacres known in Poland as the Volhynia Massacres.
Polish historians estimate that about 100,000 Poles were killed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and associated nationalist formations from 1943 to 1945 in what was then Nazi-occupied eastern Poland and is now western Ukraine.
The legacy of the wartime violence remains a sensitive issue in relations between Poland and Ukraine, with differing interpretations of the role of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the UPA.
Poland regards the killings as genocide, while many in Ukraine view the conflict as a broader wartime struggle involving violence on both sides and emphasise the groups’ later resistance to Soviet rule.
The Volhynia region, which was within Poland's borders prior to World War II, was first occupied by the Soviets in 1939, and then by the Nazi Germans in 1941.
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Source: IAR, PAP