On November 14, the remains of Polish soldiers who died in September 1939 during battles with the German army were reburied in Mostyskie (Lviv region).
This was reported by the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance.
Their remains were found and exhumed in Zboishche in August 2025.
The head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance Oleksandr Alfyorov stressed that it is still difficult to establish the exact number of dead. Due to the poor arrangement of the old mass grave, some of the data has been lost, although 11 name tags were found during the exhumation.
Experts estimate that between 30 and 50 soldiers were reburied. Exact results will come after DNA tests.
Alfyorov recalled that these soldiers defended Lviv at the beginning of World War II between the Nazi and Soviet regimes. The reburial was held in the Polish military section of the local cemetery, where 138 Polish soldiers from 1939 were previously buried.
Representatives of state institutions of Ukraine and Poland participated in the ceremony. Ukraine and Poland together restore the memory of the difficult pages of history.
Relations between Poland and Ukraine in the context of exhumations
After Ukraine gained independence, the issue of the Volyn tragedy was repeatedly raised by politicians in both countries. Ukraine and Poland held joint events to honor the victims and tried to find points of understanding. However, after Poland recognized the Volyn tragedy as genocide in 2016, discussions intensified.
In response to the mass destruction of Ukrainian monuments in Poland in 2015-2017 and due to the inadequate investigation of these crimes, Ukraine imposed so-called moratoriums on the search and exhumation of the remains of Poles who were killed in 1943-1945 by UPA fighters.
In December 2020, the heads of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance and the Institute of National Remembrance of the Republic of Poland agreed to hold consultations to resolve the problematic issues. They developed a draft regulation of the group to resolve them, but Poland has not yet approved it.
In June 2022, the Ministries of Culture of Ukraine and Poland signed a Memorandum of Cooperation in the Field of National Remembrance. It provided for the search, exhumation, and burial of victims. The Memorandum was to come into force after the end of martial law in Ukraine. However, Poland, during the full-scale Russian invasion, constantly raises the issue of searching for and exhuming the graves of Poles in Ukraine.
In 2023, Ukraine went to Poland and conducted joint research with the Poles on the territory of the former village cemetery of the village of Sadove, Chortkiv district, Ternopil region (the former village of Puzhnyky).
At the same time, Poland did not fulfill Ukraineʼs request to restore the memorial plaque at the burial place of UPA soldiers on Monastyr Mountain. The issue of its restoration in its original form, with the names of those buried in this mass grave, was raised at the highest level — the presidents of Ukraine and Poland.
In January 2025, Ukraine allowed the exhumation of the bodies of Polish victims of the Volyn tragedy for the first time. And in May, the exhumation of the victims of 1945 was completed in the Ternopil region — in Poland it was called a breakthrough.
In September, a Ukrainian expedition began exhuming the bodies of UPA soldiers on Polish territory — in the village of Jureckova, Podkarpacie Voivodeship.
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