How Poland and Ukraine are Rebuilding Trust one Grave at a Time

For all the arguments between Poland and Ukraine over their wartime history, something rather different is happening at an Orthodox cemetery in Łasków, eastern Poland, where Ukrainian researchers have uncovered the remains of around 30 people. Some were buried individually, others together. The Polish authorities issued permission for the search on August 31 and work began on October 6. The researchers believe they are finding Ukrainians killed when units of the Polish Home Army and Peasant Battalions attacked Łasków on March 10, 1944. JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. It is uncomfortable history for Poland. Civilians were killed. Ukrainian researchers estimate that 327 Łasków residents perished in 1944, while Polish historian Mariusz Zajączkowski has put the number death toll in the village during the attack at 186. Łasków was also not an isolated event. Polish underground forces attacked a number of Ukrainian settlements that day, including Sahryń in the same region. The Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) itself acknowledges that Home Army and Peasant Battalion units killed Ukrainians there “regardless of sex and age”, and says civilians made up the majority of the victims. The IPN describes what happened at Sahryń as collective punishment. There was a context to it. By the spring of 1944, tens of thousands of Poles had fled west from Volhynia with stories of villages being wiped out, while the Polish underground feared that the same campaign was about to cross the Bug river into the Lublin region. Other Topics of Interest Ukraine Graduate Fellowship Group Fund to Support HKS MC/MPA Students from Ukraine Harvard Kennedy School has launched a $100K fellowship fund for Ukrainian mid-career professionals pursuing public administration degrees. The background is that from 1943, the Bandera wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army launched a campaign to remove the Polish population from Volhynia and later Eastern Galicia, attacking villages, killing civilians and driving survivors out. For Poland, these are the Volhynia massacres, and the IPN describes them as genocidal ethnic cleansing. Ukraine accepts that mass killings took place but rejects the Polish designation of genocide. That disagreement remains one of the deepest historical fault lines between the two countries. Trust without agreement And that is precisely why what is happening at Łasków matters. Poland has not changed its account of Volhynia, nor has Ukraine accepted it. Yet Warsaw has still authorized Ukrainian researchers to search for Ukrainians killed by Polish units on Polish soil. Poland and Ukraine are rebuilding a measure of trust one grave at a time. Since the breakthrough in their long-running historical dispute over the right to search for and exhume wartime victims in 2024, the two countries have gradually created a system under which each recognizes the other’s right to search for, identify and bury its dead, while retaining its own account of the history that produced those deaths. What makes this interesting is the timing. The wider Polish-Ukrainian relationship has been getting harder, not easier. This year’s bitter Nawrocki-Zelenskyy clash over the UPA landed in a political climate where Polish patience with Ukraine was already wearing thin. In July, 46% of Poles told CBOS they viewed relations with Ukraine negatively, up 19 points from 2023 and the worst result the pollster had recorded. Opposition to accepting Ukrainian refugees also rose to 52%, overtaking support, at 42%, for the first time in the survey series. And yet, amid all that deterioration, cooperation over the dead has kept moving. The exhumations are becoming one of the few places where Warsaw and Kyiv are still building trust rather than using it up. When graves were political leverage Look across the border and you can see the other half of this arrangement. This summer Polish and Ukrainian specialists returned to Ostrivky and Volia Ostrovetska in Volhynia, where Polish civilians were murdered in August 1943. They recovered 55 victims, 26 of them children. Forty-eight bodies, including 24 children, were found in one mass grave. They had been buried without coffins and in no particular order. Investigators found gunshot wounds and other injuries, together with more than 300 personal objects, among them crosses, medals, rosaries, jewelry and pieces of clothing. DNA samples were taken in the hope that at least some of the dead might finally acquire names again. This is what “reciprocal archaeology” looks like. Ukrainians are now searching for Ukrainians in Poland while Poles are searching for Poles in Ukraine. It sounds obvious that families should be allowed to recover their dead. For much of the past decade, it was anything but. After the dismantling of an unauthorized Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) monument at Hruszowice in south-eastern Poland in April 2017, Ukraine announced a ban on Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) searches. There were later limited exceptions, but the wider process remained stuck. Between 2017 and 2024, the Polish IPN sent nine general applications covering work at 65 locations, some repeatedly because permissions expired or applications had to be resubmitted. A number simply went unanswered. Making the problem smaller A breakthrough came in 2024, first through talks between Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Volodymyr Zelenskyy and then through an agreement between foreign ministers Radosław Sikorski and Andrii Sybiha in November that year. The two culture ministries created a Polish-Ukrainian Working Group on Dignified Burials. Its name is bureaucratic and, to be fair, so is much of its work. But that bureaucracy is rather the point. The group agreed to work towards clear rules and a transparent administrative procedure so that searches and exhumations would no longer require another round of political bargaining every time somebody wanted to open a grave. It set out four fairly basic rights: to search for human remains, to exhume them, to bury them according to the appropriate tradition and to allow relatives to pray or reflect at the grave. Paweł Kowal, who leads the Polish side of the process, explained last year that the bureaucracy was the focus: “We are not discussing historical or political assessments.” The idea was to make the problem smaller. The two sides stopped trying to settle Volhynia, UPA, Polish reprisals and the entire twentieth-century Polish-Ukrainian argument before somebody could be given a proper burial. That limited ambition may be one reason the mechanism has survived. Reciprocity without equivalence But there is a Polish red line here. For Poles, reciprocity over graves cannot become a suggestion that the history itself was symmetrical. Poland can allow Ukrainian teams to recover civilians killed by Polish underground units without accepting that those crimes were equivalent in scale, purpose or organization to the UPA campaign against Poles. Polish historians have documented serious crimes committed against Ukrainian civilians. Łasków and Sahryń belong in that history. Grzegorz Motyka estimates that Polish actions across the wider conflict killed around 10,000 to 15,000 Ukrainians, most of them civilians. But he also estimates that the Ukrainian anti-Polish campaign killed around 100,000 Poles and describes that campaign as an attempt physically to remove the Polish civilian population. In 2016, the Polish parliament formally designated the wartime massacres as genocide Those distinctions in scale, organization and purpose are central to the Polish interpretation of the conflict, and reciprocal archaeology does not require Poland to give them up. Poland can acknowledge that Ukrainian civilians were killed at Łasków, allow researchers to recover their bodies and give their descendants somewhere to mourn without accepting that Łasków and Volhynia carry the same historical meaning. Ukraine, likewise, can allow Polish families to recover victims of the UPA without accepting Warsaw’s designation of the massacres as genocide. This is why the arrangement works as well as it does. The argument over history will continue. Nawrocki and Zelenskyy have already shown how quickly it can flare up again. See the original here.