“Together we honor all the innocent victims of Volhynia! Memory unites us! Together we are stronger!”
Zelensky and Dudley 7/9/23
247 Presidents Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine and Andrzej Duda of Poland paid tribute this Sunday (8) to the victims of the Volhynia massacre in the Ukrainian city of Lutsk, the region where 80 years ago tens of thousands of Poles were murdered by nationalists. Ukrainians. The event took place in the Cathedral of St. Peter and Paul.
Poland says around 100,000 Poles were killed in Banderist massacres. Thousands of Ukrainians were also killed in retaliation. In 2016, Poland’s parliament recognized the killings as genocide, a notion Ukraine disputes.
“Together we honor all the innocent victims of Volhynia! Memory unites us! Together we are stronger!” the two leaders wrote on their social media, along with photos of the memorial event attended by numerous local religious leaders.
Last Friday (7), the heads of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Polish Roman Catholic Church, Svyatoslav Shevchuk and Stanislav Gadecki, signed a joint message on the anniversary of the Volhynia tragedy, condemning the crimes committed during World War II and called for reconciliation and unity of the Ukrainian and Polish people.
Responsibility for the massacre generally rests with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, known for their collaboration with the Nazis in World War II. In 2015, the Ukrainian authorities, who came to power as a result of the 2014 coup, declared these organizations to be Ukraine’s “independence fighters”.
Last month, Duda stressed that the Zelensky government had authorized Warsaw to carry out exhumation work on the remains of the victims of the massacre, for which a moratorium had been imposed by the previous authorities. “It shows a qualitative change: the current Ukrainian authorities have more understanding of the whole matter than their predecessors a few years ago,” he said at the time.
Last week Szymon Szynkowski vel Sek, Poland’s State Secretary for European Affairs, said the Ukrainian government must take concrete steps to acknowledge responsibility for the massacre, as the tragedy “remains an open wound”. (With information from RT).
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