Poland, Ukraine Reach Agreement on WWII Massacre Exhumations
A significant breakthrough has been achieved in the long-standing dispute between Poland and Ukraine over the World War II Volhynia massacres, Bloomberg reports.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced that Kyiv has agreed to allow the exhumation of Polish victims of the 1943 atrocities.
The agreement followed a meeting Tuesday in Warsaw between Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski and his Ukrainian counterpart, Andrii Sybiha. The talks yielded a compromise on the exhumation of the estimated 100,000 Poles, including women and children, murdered by Ukrainian nationalists in the Volhynia region, now part of Ukraine.
The issue had become a major point of contention, with Poland, which holds the EU’s rotating presidency in the first half of next year, linking progress on the massacres to Ukraine’s EU accession aspirations. This stance, voiced by Foreign Minister Sikorski, had drawn backlash from Ukrainain leader Volodymyr Zelensky.
