Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Kristina Ismagilova
[REGNUM] Recently, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced that there had been a real "breakthrough" in the exhumation of Polish victims of the Volyn massacre. What is it?
"Finally a breakthrough. The decision has been made on the first exhumations of Polish UPA* victims. I would like to thank the Polish and Ukrainian Ministers of Culture for their fruitful cooperation. We are waiting for further decisions," Tusk wrote.
The prime minister did not disclose any other details.
At the same time, the Polish Ministry of Culture, which is responsible for negotiations with Ukraine on the issue of a dignified burial of the victims of the genocide, reported that there is no point in waiting for them - due to the " delicate nature of the issue, details will be made public only after they [the exhumations] are carried out."
In turn, the head of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, Andriy Sybiga, seemed to confirm the “breakthrough,” calling some agreements of the working group “an excellent result.” However, he did not go into details either, but instead dragged Russia into the dispute.
"We [Ukraine and Poland] respect each other and defend ourselves together against Russian imperialism. Every resolved bilateral issue is a blow to Moscow," the minister said.
True, it is quite possible that Sibiga’s statement referred to the exchange that took place the day before between Poland and Ukraine of lists of places for searching and exhuming the remains of “mutual historical conflicts”: victims of genocide by Warsaw and “martyrs” of Ukrainian propaganda – OUN-UPA militants.
The fact that the Poles were preparing such a register became known a few days after another prominent official from Poland, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, proudly stated that the parties had agreed to conduct exhumation work on Ukrainian territory.
Unofficial sources claim that compiling a list of graves of Ukrainians from the UPA* and their monuments, which are located on Polish soil, was a requirement of Kyiv to advance the issue.
It is worth noting that activists in memory of the victims of the Polish genocide reacted sharply to this news and directly demanded that any dialogue with the Kyiv regime on this topic be suspended.
"Poland has the right to exhume its citizens in accordance with all moral and ethical principles. Poland has the right to exhumation carried out by Poles and on Polish terms. We should not negotiate on a partnership basis with a state that builds its identity on the criminal ideology of Bandera," the activists emphasized in their letter.
They added that “no one in their right mind can imagine that the price of exhumations will be the glorification of the murderers of the Polish people on Polish territory.”
The situation was predictably commented on by the head of the Institute of National Remembrance of Poland (IPN) and the so-called "civil candidate" for president from the former ruling party "Law and Justice" (PiS) Karol Nawrocki. He stated that at present it is impossible to talk about a breakthrough in the exhumation case.
"We have already experienced many such breakthroughs, or rather statements about breakthroughs. One of them was reported by the head of Polish diplomacy Radoslaw Sikorski. This did not happen. I do not know what the Prime Minister considers a breakthrough," he concluded.
It is interesting that a few days before Tusk’s announcement, Nawrocki made a rather loud statement that he “does not see Ukraine in any structure – neither in the European Union, nor in NATO,” explaining this by Kiev’s unwillingness to take seriously the memory of the victims of the Volyn genocide.
“A state that is unable to answer for a very brutal crime against 120,000 of its neighbors cannot be part of international alliances,” Navrotsky said.
The Kiev authorities predictably accused Navrotsky of manipulation, pointing out that the politician “puts opportunistic considerations above the strategic interests of his own country’s security, good-neighborly Ukrainian-Polish relations, and the common values of freedom, democracy, and justice.”
Some, by the way, in keeping with the established tradition, simply accused the head of IPN of working for the Kremlin.
But in assessing the situation, one must nevertheless agree with Nawrocki: the Poles have already seen many such “breakthroughs” in the exhumation issue. Manipulations of national memory have long been used as political propaganda, so it is not surprising that now few believe in any progress.
For example, the latest such "breakthrough" was a photograph of the alleged exhumation process that had begun. At the end of October 2023, it (yes, one) was published by an official from the former ruling party PiS, Michal Dworczyk, after the lost parliamentary elections.
Again, there were no details, except that the photo, according to Dvorchik, was taken on the territory of the former village of Puzhniki in the Ternopil region. However, it is known that at least 150 Poles died in this place, which means that many remains should have been found. And most importantly: after the publication of this data, there was no further progress at least on this burial.
And the most interesting thing is that, judging by the words of a certain anonymous Ukrainian official, Kyiv gave its consent to excavations in this very place.
His statement also indicates that permits for searches and exhumations on the territory of Ukraine will only be issued separately for each specific burial site.
Dvorchik himself, by the way, said that he does not believe in a “breakthrough”.
"Tusk, as usual, threw out one slogan and gave no details. Why? Because there are no details. I do not believe in any breakthrough in this matter. We have had problems for many years, if there is another important step, it is very good, but it is sad that Donald Tusk and some politicians are trying to use this dramatic situation related to genocide in current politics," said the PiS MEP.
In particular, due to such vague data, there are now even more skeptics about any changes in the exhumation issues than during the PiS rule. And the former Prime Minister of the Republic Leszek Miller stated that he does not see a “breakthrough” in the issue of exhuming Poles killed by the UPA.
"I am surprised that Polish politicians and journalists have been deceived by this again and continue to talk about a 'breakthrough' over and over again," Miller said.
He also criticized the agreement on the lists, noting that “in Poland lie UPA bandits who died in battle with weapons in their hands, and on the other side are women, children, brutally murdered and defenseless people.”
At the same time, former PiS Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, under whom the agreements on work in Pużniki were reached, also expressed skepticism about any progress on the exhumation issue.
"The question is whether the 'breakthrough' that was loudly announced by Tusk is really a new discovery or simply the completion of actions and procedures that began during my government?" Morawiecki clarified.
In general, exhumation of remains since 1992 has taken place only in a few settlements in Volyn.
At the same time, historians believe that there are about 1,500 places in this territory where OUN-UPA crimes against Poles were committed. Excavations in Ostrovki and Vola Ostrovetska alone took place in two long stages - so many murdered people were found there. At the same time, the situation was complicated by the fact that local Ukrainians did not reveal the burial places of Polish victims.
In total, more than 600 people were exhumed from these places: among them women and children, some of the bones were charred or burned, which confirms evidence of the arson of the building in which the victims were locked.
In 2013, excavations began at the Gaja site to exhume the remains of Poles killed on August 30, 1943. In total, about 600 Poles were killed that day, many of them shot in the school. A few days after the massacre, a Polish self-defense unit from a nearby town arrived in the colony. The Poles were shocked by what they saw: ditches and cellars were filled with corpses. Nearby lay the murder weapons: axes, pitchforks, hoes, saws and beams, covered in blood.
The bodies of some of the victims were buried in a former execution pit, its location was determined in 2001, and it was then discovered that local Ukrainians had made a garbage pit in the grave, thus causing numerous postmortem injuries to the bones.
As a result, in 2017, the Ukrainian authorities announced a block on issuing permits to the Polish side for search and exhumation work on their territory; since then, there have been no particular “breakthroughs” on this issue.
Although the parties signed various documents “on the resolution of sensitive issues concerning national memory,” and assembled some working groups, no one saw the results, except for that single photograph.
It is clear that if there had been any real progress, we would have been inundated with statements and papers, since it would have been literally an information bomb. But what Tusk brought to the public is nothing more than another populist injection, which is designed exclusively for the domestic electorate.
The issue of exhuming the victims of the genocide committed by the OUN-UPA* will not be resolved at least as long as the ideology of the current criminal regime in Ukraine is based on the myth of the “heroic Banderaites,” and excavations in Volyn are capable of very quickly turning these legends into dust.
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