The work is being carried out by an interdisciplinary team from Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), including a forensic medicine specialist from Wrocław Medical University, alongside a Ukrainian partner organisation and representatives of Poland's Ministry of Culture.
The operation received Ukrainian authorisation in December 2025 and is expected to run until 1 May 2026.
It is the latest stage of a mission that began in 1992.
Previous excavations – conducted in 1992, 2011 and 2015 – have already recovered the remains of 674 people killed on 30 August 1943 by units of the OUN-UPA, the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
Ukraine's own Institute of National Remembrance (UINP) said in a statement that both villages were attacked and burned in late August 1943, with most residents killed.
It described the Polish-Ukrainian wartime conflict as "a tragic chapter in the history of both nations", adding that civilians on both sides bore the heaviest toll, and called for continued dialogue as "a guarantee of dignified commemoration of the victims".
Volhynia Massacres
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 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 OUN and 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