Exhumation after relevant agreements with the Polish side began on Thursday morning in the Ternopil region, RMF24 reports, writes UNN.
Details
As indicated, researchers arrived in the former village of Puzhnyky with several tons of equipment. A base was set up on the site of the mass grave - in the middle of the forest - and work began. The area is guarded by the police.
"On Thursday morning, April 24, exhumations began here," the report said.
The work, as indicated, is carried out by a Polish-Ukrainian group of researchers, which includes, in particular, forensic scientists, archaeologists, geneticists and anthropologists. On the Polish side, there are researchers from the Freedom and Democracy Foundation, scientists from the Pomeranian Medical University and representatives of the Institute of National Remembrance.
"Polish citizens were killed in Puzhnyky, the identities of whom we know. We want to identify all the victims of that dramatic night in 1945 and bury them with dignity. This is what families who are alive and involved in the process are waiting for, for example, by donating genetic material," said Maciej Wrubel from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland before the start of the exhumation.
According to the RMF FM correspondent, the whole procedure is very complicated, as the cemetery and the mass grave, i.e. the place where the exhumations are carried out, are located in the middle of the forest.
Background
In December 2020, the heads of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance and the Institute of National Remembrance of the Republic of Poland (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej) agreed to hold Ukrainian-Polish expert consultations in January-February 2021 to resolve problematic issues in the field of commemorating the memory of victims of wars and political repressions. As a result of a long correspondence, a draft regulation of the group to consider problematic issues was developed.
In June 2022, a Memorandum of Cooperation in the field of national memory was signed at the level of the Ministries of Culture of Ukraine and Poland. The document provided for the creation of a Ukrainian-Polish working group chaired by deputy ministers of culture, which will implement joint agreements on cooperation between states on issues of search, exhumation, burial, commemoration, legalization, reconstruction and legal protection of places of commemoration and burial. According to the Memorandum, the working group should include representatives of relevant institutions of Poland and Ukraine, as well as representatives of the expert community.
In 2023, Ukraine met Poland halfway and, in accordance with the Memorandum, joint Ukrainian-Polish research was conducted to establish the burial site of Poles on the territory of the former village cemetery of the former village of Puzhnyky in the Ternopil region.
At the beginning of 2024, historical issues were updated during intergovernmental consultations between Poland and Ukraine during the visits of Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk to Kyiv and Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal to Warsaw.