It is the first such permit to be issued following a formal request by Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN).
The permit covers excavations at Ostrówki and Wola Ostrowiecka in the Lubomyl district of Volhynia.
In April, IPN specialists carried out survey work at the sites together with Ukrainian partners and a representative of Wrocław Medical University.
They discovered two mass graves and one individual burial.
Based on those findings, IPN submitted its request to Ukrainian authorities in May.
The villages were destroyed on August 30, 1943, when Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) units killed more than 1,000 Polish inhabitants.
Historians estimate that around 2,500 Poles died across more than 30 settlements in the Lubomyl area that same day.
Previous exhumations at the site, carried out in 1992, 2011 and 2015, recovered and gave a dignified burial to the remains of 674 victims.
The new works aim to locate around 350 further victims.
Ukraine's approval also covers exhumations at a site in the Holosko area of Lviv, where Polish soldiers killed in 1939 are buried, and a DNA re-examination of remains of 60 Polish soldiers reinterred in 2015–2016 at a cemetery in Mostyska.
Volhynia Massacres
The 1943 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.
(ał)
Source: PAP