Oleksandr Alfiorov made the remarks in an interview with the RBK-Ukraina portal published on Saturday.
“We are not husband and wife. We are two different, separate families”, Alfiorov said. He dismissed the notion that the two should live as “brotherly nations”, noting that Ukraine also “lived in friendship” with Russia in the 20th century.
Asked whether Polish grievances over the Volhynia massacres could hamper Ukraine’s bid to join the European Union, Alfiorov said Kyiv was ready for steps “within humanism” that do not cross its national interests.
“We are an independent, sovereign state, not someone’s object”, he said, adding that one nation’s hero is often another’s villain. Ukrainians revere the 17th-century Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky, he said, while Poles see him as an enemy.
Alfiorov pointed to progress on history. A congress of more than 100 historians, co-organised with Polish partners at a castle in Poland in May, saw sharp debate over the 14th, 17th and 20th centuries.
“When professional historians talk, there is no room for unfounded accusations, because they work with sources and facts”, he said.
In September, he said, the institute published 2,700 archive documents on Polish-Ukrainian conflicts from 1939 to 1947, unfiltered and in the original language. Ukraine was also issuing exhumation permits and guarding search sites, he added.
The two countries have long been divided over the nationalist Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and its military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Between 1943 and 1945 the groups carried out ethnic cleansing that killed nearly 100,000 Poles, many of them women and children.
Poland calls the killings genocide. Many Ukrainian historians and politicians see them as part of a wider conflict in which both sides bore blame. In Ukrainian memory, the groups are often regarded as symbols of the fight for independence and of postwar resistance to Soviet rule.
Kyiv banned searches and exhumations of Polish victims in 2017, after a UPA monument was dismantled in Hruszowice, south-eastern Poland. The two governments announced the ban’s end in November 2024.
Since then, work has moved ahead at several sites. Exhumations at the former Volhynia villages of Ostrówki and Wola Ostrowiecka in July and August uncovered the remains of 55 people, including 26 children. They were reburied on 30 August.
In Lviv, the remains of 115 Polish soldiers killed defending the city in September 1939 were exhumed at the Hołosko cemetery from 25 August. On 8 August, the institute approved further exhumations at Huta Pieniacka and Uhly.
A new search began on 31 August in Puźniki, in the Ternopil region, for a mass grave of Poles killed by the UPA in 1945. Polish teams recovered the remains of at least 42 people there last year.
(jh)
Source: PAP