“The Ukrainian side has suggested that it might be possible to settle the issue of exhumation of Polish victims of the Volhynian crime,” the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Radosław Sikorski said during an interview with Polish Radio. Sikorski recalled the Ukrainian National Remembrance Institute’s new statement on the matter. “By their fruits, you shall know them,’ the head of diplomacy concluded.

On Polish Radio’s Third Program, Sikorski was asked why the Ukrainian authorities do not want to agree to the exhumation of the victims of the Volhynian crime. The Polish authorities, including the IPN, have been demanding for several years that Kyiv agree to exhume the victims of the OUN-UPA and to bury them with dignity.

“I hope this Christian duty will simply be concluded,” – Sikorski said.

Sikorski stressed that there is a full national consensus in Poland on the exhumation of the victims of the Volhynian Massacre. He reminded that the exhumation problem was brought to the Ukrainian side by President Andrzej Duda, the Speaker of the Sejm Szymon Hołownia and Deputy Prime Minister, head of the Ministry of Defence Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz.

Minister Sikorski also said that he discussed the issue with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenski during their September meeting in Kyiv. 

“While discussing this in Kyiv three weeks ago, I received assurance that the matter would be settled. I hope it will be settled because we want to do this not to annoy Ukraine, but so that Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation, friendship, alliance is free of this issue,” Sikorski said.

Poland and Ukraine have been in dispute for years over the memory of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which committed genocidal ethnic cleansing of some 100,000 Polish men, women and children in 1943-45.

While Poland speaks out about mass, organised genocide of the UPA and OUN, the Ukrainians consider it a symmetrical conflict for which both sides were equally responsible.

The Ukrainian side only recognises the anti-Soviet character of its nationalistic movement (due to their post-war resistance to the USSR) and not as one of anti-Polish, anti-Semitic and genocidal character.

Source: PAP

Tomasz Modrzejewski

Photo: X @radeksikorski