Ukraine issues new permits to exhume remains of Polish WWII victims

Authorities in Ukraine have issued permission to exhume the remains of Polish victims killed during World War II in the former village of Huta Pieniacka, now in Ukraine's western Lviv region.

Photo:

PAP/Vitaliy Hrabar

Ukrainian authorities also approved search and exhumation work in the village of Uhly in the Rivne region, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory said on Saturday.

The decisions were made a day earlier by Ukraine's State Interagency Commission on Commemoration of Participants in the Anti-Terrorist Operation, War Victims and Political Repression, according to a statement.

The commission approved exhumation work at the site of the former village of Huta Pieniacka as part of agreements reached by a Polish-Ukrainian working group on historical memory, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory said on Facebook.

It also approved exhumation work in the village of Uhly involving people who were killed or went missing during World War II.

In a separate decision, the commission approved the collection of DNA samples from remains buried between 1992 and 2015 at a cemetery in the former village of Ostrówki.

Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) said on Friday that exhumation work carried out from July 13 to August 7 at the sites of the former villages of Ostrówki and Wola Ostrowiecka had uncovered the remains of 55 people, including 26 children, as well as more than 300 personal items.

The remains are due to be reburied on August 30.

Search work in Huta Pieniacka ended in June, with human remains located at 25 sites covering an area of more than 200 square metres, Polish state news agency PAP reported.

Searches were also conducted in Uhly in March but did not locate a mass grave. Investigators found the remains of a cemetery chapel and a single skeleton that they said could be linked to WWII massacres of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists.

Poland and Ukraine have long been divided over the historical role of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which historians say carried out an ethnic cleansing campaign against Poles from 1943 to 1945.

Poland considers the killings of Polish civilians to have constituted genocide. Many Ukrainian historians and politicians view them as part of a broader Polish-Ukrainian conflict in which both sides were responsible for violence.

In Ukraine, the OUN and UPA are also often regarded as symbols of the struggle for independence and post-WWII resistance to the Soviet Union.

A dispute over Polish searches and exhumations in Ukraine had persisted since 2017, when the Ukrainian institute imposed a ban following the dismantling of a UPA monument in Hruszowice, southeastern Poland.

The moratorium on searches and exhumations of Polish victims of what are known as the Volhynia Massacres was lifted in November 2024, following talks between Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski and his Ukrainian counterpart Andrii Sybiha.

Polish teams conducted exhumations last year at the site of the former village of Puźniki, now Puzhnyky in Ukraine’s Ternopil region, recovering the remains of at least 42 people.

They were reburied on September 6.

A subsequent search completed in late June did not locate a second mass grave, with another stage of searches tentatively scheduled to begin on August 17.

Polish historians estimate that about 100,000 Poles were killed by the UPA and associated nationalist formations from 1943 to 1945 in what was then Nazi-occupied eastern Poland and is now western Ukraine.

The Volhynia region, which was within Poland's borders prior to WWII, was first occupied by the Soviets in 1939, and then by the Nazi Germans in 1941.

(gs)

Source: IAR, PAP