The director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, Anton Drobovych, has said that Ukraine will no longer impede the exhumation of Polish graves.
“With regard to the blocking of exhumations: I don’t think this will happen again because this is about humanism and universal human respect. For our part, we will not impede, and I think that Poland will not hinder such processes either. If any such incidents happen, international mediators should be called in, but I think there will be no more such incidents,” Drobovych told the Pryamiy television channel.
Vandalism on anyone’s part is unacceptable, he stressed.
“Usually, acts of vandalism are provocations. And everyone knows full well where the ultimate beneficiaries of such provocations sit. So we want, in cooperation with law enforcement, to point at those people, to make it clear that this is not hooliganism but deliberate attempts to sow animosity between our two peoples,” Drobovych said.
Kyiv is open “to cooperation on everything that lies in the domain of historical facts, not historical assessments,” he said.
“I would like to see, finally, a joint Ukrainian-Polish textbook published. I think we will create one, one way or another, with or without the participation of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance,” Drobovych said.
In April 2017 local authorities in the Polish village of Hruszowice, near Przemysl, removed a monument to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UIA (banned in Russia), prompting the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance to suspend the process of legalizing Polish memorials in Ukraine, and demand an inquiry into attacks on the Ukrainian memorial sites in Poland between 2014 and 2017.
Meanwhile, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance said that the UIA fighters’ grave in Hruszowice could be restored after archeological studies and a confirmation that the site did contain the remains of the Ukrainians.
In late 2017 the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance proposed a moratorium on the exhumation of the Poles buried in Ukraine, due to acts of vandalism against gravestones and monuments on the Ukrainian graves in Poland, including the Hruszowice monument removal.
At a meeting between Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and Poland’s Andrzej Duda in Warsaw in August 2019 Ukraine confirmed its readiness to allow the exhumation of bodies from Polish burial sites on its territory while Poland would put in order Ukrainian memorial sites on its territory.
In late September Polish Radio, citing the Polish ambassador in Kyiv, said that Ukraine had formally agreed to resume the exhumation work.
