Ukraine to rebury remains of Polish WWII soldiers following exhumations
The remains of Polish World War Two soldiers exhumed in the former village of Zboiska, now part of the Ukrainian city of Lviv, will receive a dignified burial on November 14, Ukraine's ambassador to Poland has announced.
Vasyl Bodnar, reporting for the Ukrainian agency Ukrinform, said on Saturday that two exhumations had recently been carried out in the country.
In the first location, Puzhnyky (Polish name 'Puzniki'), the burial has already taken place. Meanwhile, "the remains of Polish Army soldiers exhumed in Lviv will be reburied in Mostyska (in Lviv Oblast - PAP) on November 14."
The ambassador further said that a few days earlier, the working group responsible for search and exhumation work held a meeting to summarise preliminary results and discuss further steps.
"Now it is most important that the pace of work, which was agreed upon earlier, does not slow down, so that we can show the Ukrainian and Polish societies practical work, openness and readiness to act on both sides," Bodnar said.
When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Polish forces under the command of Colonel Stanislaw Maczek engaged in intense combat with the Wehrmacht, unified armed forces of Nazi Germany, in the Zboiska area.
Recently, the Polish and Ukrainian governments reached an agreement on resuming the exhumations of Polish victims, including those of Ukrainian nationalists in Ukraine. The research had been stalled for years due to a dispute between Warsaw and Kyiv over the role of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a World War II military organisation that Poland claims was responsible for the mass murder of Polish civilians, while Ukrainians often regard it as a liberation force. (PAP)
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