"A fact-finding visit was held in the town of Uhly in the Rivne region with the participation of specialists from the Ukrainian and Polish sides - to discuss further research that will take place in March and April 2026"
- the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture announced in a statement on Tuesday.
It was noted that during the visit, Ukrainian and Polish specialists assisted by representatives of state authorities and local government, inspected the site of future searches and established potential dates for their completion. Logistical issues, urgent needs, work methodology, and security issues during their implementation were also discussed - particularly relevant due to ongoing full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Ukraine's Ministry of Culture also announced that activities in the current format of the Polish-Ukrainian Working Group will continue in 2026. The plans include further works in the former village of Puźniki (Ternopil region) and in the former village of Hołosko (Lviv region) in western Ukraine, as well as in southeastern Poland's Jureczkowa village.
Meanwhile, relevant permits have been confirmed for new exploration and exhumation activities in 2026 in the aforementioned Uhly and in the former villages of Huta Pieniacka and Ostrówki in today's western Ukraine - while similar work is planned in southeastern Poland's villages of Sahryń and Łasków.
For many years, Poland and Ukraine have been divided by their memories of the Volhynia Massacre - a series of brutal ethnic cleansings that took place in the 1940s, during the Nazi German occupation.
In the course of the Volhynia Massacre, recognized in Poland as a genocide, tens of thousands of Polish civilians, women and children included, were cruelly murdered by the most extreme faction of Ukrainian nationalist partisans - who operated with at least partial Nazi approval in German-occupied regions of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, in which ethnic Poles, Ukrainians and other nations historically co-existed for centuries.
As per the Polish studies into the matter, this barbaric act of ethnic cleansing was not sanctioned by Ukraine's higher authorities of the time, and was initiated by military commanders of the extremist Ukrainian Insurgent Army (OUN / UPA).
Even including the non-military participants, the fascist partisans who committed this genocide were just a fraction of percent of then-Ukraine's total population - and definitely did not represent the viewpoint of the entire nation.
The complexity of the events is well illustrated by the fact that the massacre's victims also included a number of ethnic Ukrainians - who were either married into Polish families or simply stood up to defend their ethnically Polish neighbours. Meanwhile, the ethnically Ukrainian nationalist perpetrators technically held Polish citizenship, as since Poland's regaining of independence in 1918 till WW2 the region was within Poland's borders.
Still, due to the severely barbaric character and scale of the crime - this historical wound has long strained relations between the Poles and Ukrainians, and between the two states as well. It has also been regularly and successfully used by Russia to fan the historical antagonisms and drive a wedge between its two neighbours.
Since the spring of 2017, a dispute has raged over the ban on the search and exhumation of the remains of Polish victims of wars and conflicts on Ukrainian territory, issued by the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance following the dismantling of the UPA monument in southeastern Poland's village of Hruszowice in April 2017.
The decision to lift the moratorium on the search and exhumation of the remains of Polish victims of the Volhynian massacre was announced in late November 2024, during a joint press conference by the foreign ministers of Poland and Ukraine, Radosław Sikorski and Andriy Sybiha.
Ukraine confirmed at the time that "there are no obstacles to Polish state institutions and private entities conducting search and exhumation work on Ukrainian territory, in cooperation with the relevant Ukrainian institutions, in accordance with Ukrainian law." It also declared its "readiness to positively consider applications in these matters."
The long-awaited exhumations of the Polish victims in today's Ukraine may become at least a small step towards reconciliation over these tragic events.
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Source: PAP, IAR