JURECZKOWA, Poland -- On a rainy morning on September 30, a team of Ukrainian researchers carefully cut into soil around a metal cross in a forest in southeastern Poland. They were digging for the remains of 18 fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).
“According to information we’ve been given, a battle took place just north of here on March 4, 1947,” Svyatoslav Sheremeta, the head of Ukraine’s Dolya Memorial Center, told RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service in the forest near Jureczkowa, about four kilometers from the Ukraine border. “A local says Polish Army troops brought the dead UPA soldiers here.”
If found, the remains of the men will be exhumed, identified if possible, and then reburied in individual graves.
The expedition is a result of a delicate diplomatic agreement allowing Polish and Ukrainian teams to search select areas of each other's territory for victims of what Warsaw calls the Volhynian Massacre, and Kyiv refers to as the Volyn Tragedy.
Tens of thousands of people, predominantly ethnic Poles, were killed in the 1940s by Ukrainian nationalists seeking to create an ethnically homogenous territory that would form part of an independent, postwar Ukraine. Thousands of Ukrainians, including civilians, were killed in retaliatory violence. The massacres took place mostly in lands around the nexus of today’s Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus.
The killings have long cast a shadow over relations between the neighboring countries. Warsaw has made repeated calls for its teams to be permitted to search areas of western Ukraine for the remains of their slain compatriots and in 2016 Poland established July 11 as a “National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Genocide committed by Ukrainian nationalists against citizens of the Second Polish Republic.”
Ukraine has pushed back against Polish definitions of the 1940s violence as genocide and rejected requests for Polish research teams to dig for victims. But in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and an urgent need for Western weapons, Kyiv has become increasingly conciliatory over the issue.
In October 2024, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski responded to a question about the issue of exhumations, telling a reporter, “People are entitled to a Christian burial,” adding, “I don’t see why [exhumations] should be blocked between countries that help one another.” A month later, Kyiv announced there were “no obstacles” to exhumations and Polish teams began work in Ukraine shortly afterwards.
In May 2025, Polish researchers uncovered the remains of scores of civilians, including women and children, in western Ukraine. Polish teams plan a total of 13 digs on Ukrainian territory, while Sheremeta’s rain-hampered expedition is one of four such operations that will take place in Poland.
In the dripping forest in southeastern Poland, the dig on September 30 wrapped up at around 4 p.m. with no sign of Ukrainian remains. The search here is hampered by the fact no living witnesses to the 1947 events were found who could pinpoint the burial location. Work was continuing in the area through October 3.
