Polish and Ukrainian researchers have found another mass grave of Poles killed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in 1945 in the area of the former village of Puzsniki in western Ukraine, Polish minister without portfolio Michal Dworczyk announced on Friday.
"After four months of difficult research, Polish and Ukrainian experts found the mass grave of Poles who fell victim to Ukrainian nationalists and murdered residents of the village," wrote Dworczyk on the X social network.
The Minister of Heritage and Culture Piotr Glinski announced on social media: Warsaw has appealed to Kyiv for permission to exhume, examine and give a dignified burial to the victims. He pointed out: this is the first case in nine years that another mass grave of UPA victims has been found in Ukraine.
In Puszniki in February 1945, the UPA murdered about a hundred Poles, mostly women and children.
The search for the mass grave began at the site this summer. In early July, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki paid tribute to the memory of the victims in Puszniki.
The mass murder is considered part of the 1943-1945 Volhynia (Wolyn in Polish) massacre.
During the ethnic cleansing against the Polish population committed by the UPA and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), about one hundred thousand Poles were massacred in Volhynia and the former Eastern Galicia, now part of Ukraine.
Warsaw and Kiev view the Volhynia massacre in different ways, while the Polish side classifies what happened as genocide,
the Ukrainian side, referring to the retaliation committed by the Polish side, which is orders of magnitude smaller than the Ukrainian one, speaks of bilateral proportional responsibility.
In 2017, Ukraine stopped the excavation of the mass graves hiding the victims. The Kyiv government indicated last year that it approved the continuation of the research.
Maciej Dancewicz, the vice president of the Freedom and Democracy Foundation founded by Dworczyk, which organized the excavation in Puzsniki from the Polish side, told the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita:
the Polish side expects that "Puzhniki can dissolve the opposition of the Ukrainian side (…) and make a breakthrough in preventing the dignified burial of the victims of the OUN and UPA on Ukrainian territory".
MTI
Photo: Massacre in Volhynia
