Long Feud Threatens Kyiv Alliance --- Poland and Ukraine can't untangle painful past

“BOROVE, Ukraine -- This summer, a small crowd gathered around six freshly exhumed human skeletons protruding from the ground on the edge of a sunflower field in Ukraine.

 

They belonged to Poles massacred by Ukrainian ultranationalists who allied with Nazi forces in World War II.

 

The discovery of burial sites like the one here has long eaten away at relations between the neighbors. Kyiv has lionized the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, known in Ukraine as the UPA, as freedom fighters who fought the Soviets, but they are remembered in Poland for the slaughter of tens of thousands of Poles near the two countries' modern-day borders.

 

That ill feeling -- compounded by the anxiety some Poles feel about being swamped by Ukrainian farm exports and the strain from hosting millions of refugees -- is resurgent again and provides Russia with a useful wedge to drive the two countries apart.

 

Moscow has pointed to Ukraine's defense of the UPA and other nationalist groups to justify President Vladimir Putin's claim that he launched the activity to "denazify" Ukraine. Russia's prosecutor general last month denounced the UPA and other partisans as collaborators and war criminals. It is almost certain the Kremlin will seize on any fresh opportunity to add more grit into the relationship between Ukraine and Poland, which has helped underpin Kyiv's defense over the past 4 1/2 years.

 

"One of the lessons of history is: when the Poles and Ukrainians don't get it together, Moscow benefits," said Daniel Fried, former U.S. ambassador to Poland and a fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington.

 

At the heart of the dispute is a campaign of ethnic cleansing that took place in the historical Volhynia region between 1943 and 1945. The Nazis empowered Ukrainian nationalists allied with the UPA, who saw Volhynia as a historic part of Ukraine and believed it would only be safe if its sizable Jewish and Polish minorities were removed.

 

The scars run deep. Around a million Jews were killed in this part of Europe during World War II, before groups allied with the UPA began slaughtering Polish residents of Volhynia. Historians estimate that up to 90,000 Poles died, as well as several thousand Ukrainians targeted in reprisal attacks.

 

Zdzislaw Zurowski was 6 years old when Ukrainian bands entered his village, but he had left hours earlier when his mother received advance warning of the planned attack. His father, a local miner, hid out in the nearby woods.

 

"He was very lucky to survive," Zurowski said.

 

Now 91, Zurowski spent decades not knowing the true scale of the Volhynia massacres. It wasn't until after the Soviet collapse in 1991 that the newly independent Ukraine permitted Polish archaeologists to conduct exhumations in Volhynia to reveal the extent of the slaughter.

 

Most of the Polish villages had disappeared from the map; sometimes the only signs they ever existed are the apple trees left behind in fields and forest clearings. Leon Popek, an archaeologist with Poland's Institute of National Memory that oversees the digs, said only 850 Polish victims have been found -- perhaps 1% of the total killed.

 

"This work will continue for many, many years," said Popek, who lost his grandfather and more than 20 other relatives in the massacres and has been doing exhumations in the region for 35 years.

 

It was perhaps unsurprising then that Poland reacted angrily when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky renamed a military unit in honor of the UPA this spring. Warsaw denounced the decision as a major step back in the long process of reconciliation and Polish President Karol Nawrocki stripped Zelensky of Poland's highest honor.

 

Zelensky responded by skipping a Polish conference on Ukraine's postwar reconstruction. Poland said it would block Ukraine's bid to join the European Union as long as it insisted on honoring the UPA.

 

Zelensky fired back. "No one will ever dictate which heroes we should honor," he said in June as he unveiled plans for a memorial complex in Kyiv listing the names of Ukrainian resistance fighters such as the UPA.

 

Both sides have tried to lower the temperature since then. Zelensky has sent senior officials for talks in Warsaw, and promised to open Ukrainian security and intelligence archives to researchers and greenlight more exhumations in Volhynia.

 

European officials and their counterparts in Poland and Ukraine warn that the rift over the World War II massacres serves neither side.

 

Both sides now hope the continuing exhumations in Volhynia, which restarted this summer after a more-than-decadelong pause, might yet bring the two countries closer together rather than divide them. But it won't be easy.

 

Popek and his team narrowed their latest search to two sites -- an abandoned farm and the remains of an old school outside the former villages of Ostrowka and Wola Ostrowiecka.

 

Nearby, teams of archaeologists worked in tents, assembling skeletons out of the discovered bones and piecing together skulls that were destroyed by blunt-force trauma. In one tent, dozens of cardboard boxes containing the remains of 42 other victims were stacked in a corner.

 

Together with the human bones, items of clothing, plastic rosaries and small aluminum medallions were found. One showed the Virgin Mary and was engraved with words from a traditional Catholic prayer in Polish. Further DNA tests will be done to confirm the victims were Poles.

 

At the end of August, Polish government officials gathered with a large crowd at the old cemetery outside Ostrowka for a ceremony to rebury the 55 bodies found during exhumations this summer, which lay in small coffins in the earth.

 

Zurowski said he harbors no animosity toward Ukrainians. But he is offended by Zelensky's decision to uphold the renaming of the military unit in the UPA's name.

 

"The Ukrainians hope that time will pass and everyone will forget," he said. "But we cannot forget this."” [1]

 

1. World News: Long Feud Threatens Kyiv Alliance --- Poland and Ukraine can't untangle painful past.  Luxmoore, Matthew; Kalin, Stephen.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 28 Sep 2026: A8.