Ukraine should exhume and rebury ethnic Poles murdered on its territory, regardless of the ongoing Russian invasion, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said in an interview with the Financial Times published on Tuesday.

“People are entitled to a Christian burial and it doesn’t affect Ukraine’s war effort. I don’t see why (exhumations) should be blocked between countries that help one another,” Sikorski said, addressing the controversies around the exhumations of the victims of the massacre in Volhynia, in which some 100,000 people were killed.

The Financial Times notes that Minister Sikorski’s statement reflects the Polish government’s new approach to the historical issues ahead of the presidential election in May. The Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance recently said it would be willing to resume the search for Polish victims in mass graves next year. 

The newspaper recalls that Kyiv halted the process in 2017 to protest against the removal of a Ukrainian nationalist monument in Poland. Kyiv is also challenging the Polish parliament’s 2016 decision to label the massacres as genocide and recently expressed irritation after warnings from Warsaw that this historical issue, if not resolved, could undermine Ukraine’s EU membership negotiations.

The head of the Foreign Ministry also said that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in July had “missed an opportunity” to meet reparation demands presented by Donald Tusk as an alternative to the previous government’s claims that amounted to EUR 1.3 trillion.

Minister Sikorski demanded the creation of a Polish World War 2 victims memorial in Berlin, German investment in military cooperation, and compensation for the Polish victims of the German Nazi occupation. Pointing out that Scholz had only offered €200 million in compensation and had no plans to invest in joint defence funding, Sikorski said: “Tusk said that 200 million euros alone would not convince the Poles … and I think he was right.”

The Polish minister admitted that on the issue of war claims, the Tusk government is now ‘more or less’ on the same side as Andrzej Duda and PiS. As the ‘FT’ pointed out, recent opinion polls show that a majority of Poles want reparations from Germany, while public sentiment towards Ukraine has deteriorated. Only 53 per cent of respondents are still in favour of accepting Ukrainian refugees, the lowest since the start of the war.

Sikorski also referred in the interview to speculation about his possible candidacy in next year’s presidential election. “I am one of many possible candidates to be a candidate,” – he said, and when asked about Tusk’s declaration that he did not want the presidency, he assessed: “I just think this time it’s for real.”

Source: PAP, Financial Times

Photo: Radek Sikorski

Tomasz Modrzejewski