Ukrainian researchers search in a forest in southeastern Poland for the stays of Ukrainian Insurgent Army fighters believed killed within the space in 1947.
Photo: Halyna Tereshchuk/RadioSvoboda.Org (RFE/RL)
JURECZKOWA, Poland — On a wet morning on September 30, a group of Ukrainian researchers fastidiously minimize into soil round a steel cross in a forest in southeastern Poland. They had been digging for the stays of 18 fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).
“According to info we’ve been given, a battle happened simply north of right here on March 4, 1947,” Svyatoslav Sheremeta, the pinnacle of Ukraine’s Dolya Memorial Center, instructed RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service within the forest close to Jureczkowa, about 4 kilometers from the Ukraine border. “A neighborhood says Polish Army troops introduced the lifeless UPA troopers right here.”
If discovered, the stays of the boys will likely be exhumed, recognized if potential, after which reburied in particular person graves.
The expedition is a results of a fragile diplomatic settlement permitting Polish and Ukrainian groups to look choose areas of one another’s territory for victims of what Warsaw calls the Volhynian Massacre, and Kyiv refers to because the Volyn Tragedy.
Tens of hundreds of individuals, predominantly ethnic Poles, had been killed within the Nineteen Forties by Ukrainian nationalists searching for to create an ethnically homogenous territory that will type a part of an impartial, postwar Ukraine. Thousands of Ukrainians, together with civilians, had been killed in retaliatory violence. The massacres happened principally in lands across the nexus of right now’s Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus.
The killings have lengthy solid a shadow over relations between the neighboring international locations. Warsaw has made repeated requires its groups to be permitted to look areas of western Ukraine for the stays of their slain compatriots and in 2016 Poland established July 11 as a “National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Genocide dedicated by Ukrainian nationalists in opposition to residents of the Second Polish Republic.”
Ukraine has pushed again in opposition to Polish definitions of the Nineteen Forties violence as genocide and rejected requests for Polish analysis groups to dig for victims. But within the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and an pressing want for Western weapons, Kyiv has change into more and more conciliatory over the problem.
In October 2024, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski responded to a query in regards to the challenge of exhumations, telling a reporter, “People are entitled to a Christian burial,” including, “I don’t see why [exhumations] must be blocked between international locations that assist each other.” A month later, Kyiv introduced there have been “no obstacles” to exhumations and Polish groups started work in Ukraine shortly afterwards.
In May 2025, Polish researchers uncovered the stays of scores of civilians, together with ladies and kids, in western Ukraine. Polish groups plan a complete of 13 digs on Ukrainian territory, whereas Sheremeta’s rain-hampered expedition is certainly one of 4 such operations that can happen in Poland.
In the dripping forest in southeastern Poland, the dig on September 30 wrapped up at round 4 p.m. with no signal of Ukrainian stays. The search right here is hampered by the actual fact no residing witnesses to the 1947 occasions had been discovered who might pinpoint the burial location. Work was persevering with within the space by means of October 3.
