Poland claims Ukraine "can only dream" about EU accession without agreements on exhumation

Ukrainska Pravda
·2 min read
309

Paweł Jabłoński, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland, has stated that without solving the issues related to the exhumation of the remains of the Poles on the territory of Ukraine "it can only dream about the EU accession".

Source: Jabłoński, in an interview Radio ZET, as reported by European Pravda

Details: The official brought up the subject of the exhumation of graves of Polish people who had been killed during the Volyn Tragedy in the 1940s in Ukraine (in Poland, these events are called the Volhynia Massacre).

Quote: "I will express our position. In my opinion, without solving this issue – and many Ukrainians realise this – Ukraine can only dream about EU accession. So we will absolutely stress that without solving this issue, there will not be long-term reconciliation with Ukraine."

To a clarifying question whether the exhumations are a condition for Poland’s support for Ukraine’s EU accession, Jabłoński replied reluctantly.

"I do not like discussing the conditions. I am talking about the reality: if we have to be in an alliance with a country, with which we have a major dispute, then the dispute must be solved, otherwise it would be hard to cooperate," he added.

In 2019, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine, promised to cancel the ban on exhumation and search for Polish victims of the Volyn Tragedy in Ukraine, implemented by his predecessors. It was a response to the demolition of the monument to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the settlement of Hruszowice in the Trans-Carpathian area. The first search operations in the city of Lviv were resumed in November 2019. The Ukrainian side explained the issuance of further permits with the renovation of the grave of the soldiers of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army on the Monastyr mountain, which was desecrated early in 2020. A destroyed tomb plate was then restored – but now, it was without the list of names of the soldiers of the UIA killed in the battles against the Soviet NKVD.

Background: At the end of October, it was revealed that Poland had sent a request to the Ukrainian authorities about the exhumation of the remains of the Poles who died in 1945, after discovering the burial in the territory of a now non-existent village of Puzhnyky in Ternopil Oblast.

The surveys report that over 60% of the Poles want Ukraine to allow unlimited exhumation of the victims of the Volyn tragedy.

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