Kyiv was left relatively undisturbed over Christmas and one of the events my wife and I were able to enjoy took place at the Art Mall on the southern edge of the city which houses an excellent gallery of contemporary Ukrainian art. On the evening we visited the gallery there was an auction to raise money for the army and a wonderful performance of carols by Chorea Kozacka.
The art and the music had us feeling inspired, but as we left for home, an air raid siren sounded.
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I tried to book an Uber, but having entered my destination in the app, I received a strange message: “Unfortunately, Uber is not available in your country.” I tried again and got the same response. Confused, I opened the GPS map and clicked on the icon showing my current coordinates. A thick blue dot appeared on the map at the address of my location: “32 Lenin Street, Mozyr, Belarus.”
A middle-aged man standing by the roadside, near us, sighed as he put his phone away.
“Are you in Belarus too?” he asked. “It’s GPS interference. They do it to confuse Russia’s Iranian drones!”
We did not hear any explosions that evening. Perhaps it was thanks to Ukrainian electronic defense systems which are capable of making changes to the GPS system in airspace, disorienting Russian drones and redirecting them out of Ukraine.
“Our cyber soldiers must have to be very careful with their redirection tricks,” I thought to myself as we walked to the Metro station. Poland is very close. We wouldn’t want a Russian drone to land there.
ISW Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 18, 2025
The Volyn tragedy
Poland is one of our staunchest allies despite some long-standing differences between us. By the end of 2024, we began to see the effect of efforts by Polish and Ukrainian historians to solve the main issue in the way of better relations between our two countries. In Ukraine, the issue concerned is called the “Volyn tragedy” – events that took place in the Volyn region of Ukraine which borders Poland and Belarus.
Before the Second World War, tens of thousands of Poles lived in Volyn alongside Ukrainians. On Sunday, July 11, 1943, when both Ukraine and Poland were occupied by Nazi Germany, fighters from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army carried out coordinated attacks on more than a hundred Polish villages and hamlets, killing about 8,000 Polish residents of Volyn, including women, children, and the elderly.
This day went down in Polish history as “Bloody Sunday” and in 2016, the Polish Parliament decided to mark it as the National Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Genocide. Attacks by Ukrainians on Poles and by Poles on Ukrainians in Volyn had begun earlier and did not end on “Bloody Sunday.”
In total, about 60,000 Poles and up to 3,000 Ukrainians died between 1942 and 1943, during the “Volyn massacre” as these events are referred to in Poland. The figures are not exact. Only five percent of the burial sites of the Polish victims have been identified.
The Volyn communiqué
In mid-December, fourteen Polish and ten Ukrainian historians signed a communiqué which speaks with a more decisive and pragmatic voice than politicians have used when addressing this painful topic.
The authors called on Ukrainians and Poles to “accept the paradigm of all victims are our victims”, that is, to refuse to divide the victims of the Volyn massacre into “ours” and “theirs”, to refuse to use the Volyn massacre for political purposes because that only leads to increased confrontation between Poland and Ukraine.
The Ukrainian and Polish historians propose, instead, to begin exhuming unmarked mass graves in order to create cemeteries and necropolises; to condemn all acts of vandalism against the burial sites of the victims of the events in Volyn; and to restore previously destroyed notices and monuments to the victims of Ukrainian-Polish hostility, both on the territory of Ukraine and on the territory of Poland.
The text of the communiqué is the result of an extensive study by a joint group of historians which considered not only the events in Volyn, but also disagreements between the two countries regarding the assessment of other dramatic events in the 1917-1923 and 1937-1947 periods.
Following the publication of the text of the communiqué, the Ukrainian signatories came under intense criticism from some Ukrainians who accused them of “surrendering national interests,” although the main national interest of Ukraine today is complete mutual understanding with Poland.
This pressure caused two Ukrainian historians to withdraw their signatures, but among those who did not withdraw their signatures, was one of Ukraine’s best-known historians, Professor of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Yaroslav Hrytsak.
“Signing (the communiqué) means that we are ready to talk to each other...,” he said. “We do not want the ‘Volyn Case’ to become the main topic in Poland’s presidential elections.”
Hrytsak is right. The first round of the Polish presidential elections will take place in just four months, on May 18. The topic of the “Volyn massacre” or “Volyn tragedy,” is bound to come up and could influence the outcome of the elections.
The Ukrainian government, meanwhile, has lifted the ban on the exhumation of Polish mass graves in Ukraine, and the vital process of exhuming the victims of the events of 1942-1943 has begun.
In Western Belarus, meanwhile, a campaign to destroy burial sites of Polish soldiers and memorials related to the Polish history of the territory has been going on for two years. Sometimes monuments and burial sites are demolished on the orders of local authorities, sometimes the destruction is presented as acts of vandalism.
Polish Belarusian relations are currently frozen. Against this backdrop, from the high ground of the new year, one can look at the future of Polish Ukrainian relations with cautious optimism.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
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