Ukraine wants the search for Volhynia victims to move faster, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an address on 11 July, the day Poland marks its national remembrance of the 1943–1945 killings. Exhumations begin in two days at the sites of the destroyed villages of Ostrivky and Volia Ostrovetska in Volyn Oblast, he said, and Ukraine has an interest in accelerating the work.
That is the one concession Warsaw has demanded for a decade, and it is arriving in the worst week for it. Ukraine is handing over the bones while Poland's president spends the same day arguing about a flag—and the two governments are no longer saying the same thing to each other.
What starts on 13 July
The work at Ostrivky and Volia Ostrovetska will run from 13 July to 7 August, the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance announced on 10 July. Both villages were attacked on the night of 28–29 August 1943; neither exists today.
Search teams worked the same ground from 20 April to 1 May this year, and Polish archaeologists reported finding a previously unknown mass grave near the old Strazhytsia farmstead. They estimated it may hold the remains of about 350 people, RMF24 reported. This week's work turns that survey into exhumation and reburial.
Ukraine imposed a moratorium on Polish search work in 2017 after Ukrainian memorials in Poland were vandalized. It was lifted in 2025. The exhumations are the substantive half of the Polish-Ukrainian memory dispute—and the half that has kept moving while everything above it broke down.
The rest of the day
Zelenskyy framed the anniversary around the present war, saying Ukraine and Poland now face one shared and mortal threat to their independence, and that it is called Russia. Speaking about the past, he said, must not put the future of either nation in doubt. Ukraine's ambassador to Poland, Vasyl Bodnar, knelt at the victims' memorial in Warsaw during a wreath-laying.
Poland's answer came in two registers. Prime Minister Donald Tusk said memory cannot be an instrument of hatred and called for solidarity built on truth, memory, and hope. Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, who attended commemorations in the Ukrainian town of Olyka, warned against a "spiral of hatred."
President Karol Nawrocki, speaking in the border village of Radruż, called on parliament to ban the red-and-black UPA flag in Poland by law. He said he blames not Ukrainians but what he called the Bandera ideology, and that turning a blind eye to genocide invites a new one. He also compared the death of a 14-year-old Polish girl at Radruż to the deaths of 14-year-old Ukrainians killed by Russia today.
Ukraine's Foreign Ministry, in its statement for the day, said the two countries share the pain and share the enemy, proposed reviving the Ukrainian-Polish Forum of Historians, and asked that the exhumation work continue without politicization.
Why the flag, why now
The dispute traces to Decree 440/2026 of 26 May, in which Zelenskyy granted the honorary title "Heroes of the UPA" to the Separate Center of Special Operations "Pivnich." Nawrocki stripped him of the Order of the White Eagle on 19 June; Zelenskyy mailed it back; three former Ukrainian presidents renounced their own.
A march is expected in Warsaw on 12 July, organized by Grzegorz Braun's Confederation of the Polish Crown—a party outside the Confederation grouping that sits in the Sejm.
Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak, speaking on Suspilne, placed Volhynia inside a chain of violence rather than at its start: the 1938 revindication campaign, Soviet rule, German occupation, the Holocaust. The chain did not end in 1943 either, he said—it ended with Operation Vistula, the Polish communist deportation of Ukrainians from the country's southeast, which historians agree was ethnic cleansing with genocidal motives.
Ukraine's Institute of National Remembrance puts the identified dead at roughly 30,000 Poles and 10,000 Ukrainians. Poland's institute estimates up to 100,000 Poles killed. Warsaw's parliament has declared the killings a genocide; Kyiv has not.
