On Friday, March 27, search operations in the village of Ugli, Rivne region, conducted jointly by a Ukrainian-Polish expedition, were completed.
This was reported by the Ministry of Culture.
During the search, specialists from the Lviv Regional Council’s KP “Dolya” together with researchers from the Pomeranian Medical University (Poland) surveyed all the planned areas — a total of over 1 000 m².
They examined the territory of the former German Evangelical cemetery and the nearby areas. According to legend, it was there that the residents of the village of Uhly, who died in 1943, could have been buried.
The research results allowed us to determine the location of the village chapel and to discover civilian German burials from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During the work, a single burial of a man was also recorded — the circumstances and time of his death are still unknown, this will be investigated. No mass burials were found.
Volyn tragedy
In 1943-1944, mass murders of Poles took place in Volyn. The Polish Institute of National Remembrance cites official data of 120 000 Poles killed in Volyn and the southeastern provinces of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and also mentions 5 000 Ukrainians killed. Ukrainian historians cite other figures: up to 20 000 Ukrainians killed and 35-40 000 Poles killed.
Discussions are also ongoing regarding the perpetrators and organizers of the crime. In Poland, the Volyn tragedy is called a "massacre", officially recognized as genocide, and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army is blamed, but this interpretation is not accepted in Ukraine.
Relations between Poland and Ukraine in the context of the Volyn tragedy
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 on resolving 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 effect 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 for the first time allowed the exhumation of the bodies of Polish victims of the Volyn tragedy. And in May, the exhumation of the victims of 1945 was completed in the Ternopil region — in Poland it is called a breakthrough.
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