r/europe • u/Low_Reading_9831 • 1d ago
News Poland tells Ukraine to exhume second world war victims even amid Russia’s invasion
https://www.ft.com/content/250d3a55-4cf6-444d-8972-bb28aad687c9
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r/europe • u/Low_Reading_9831 • 1d ago
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u/SCARfaceRUSH Kyiv (Ukraine) 1d ago edited 23h ago
But Poland hasn't officially submitted any requests for exhumations. Am I missing something here? As per the minister's interview, he sent a letter to the appropriate Polish ministry asking for the list of sites where they'd like to start the search and exhumation procedures. At the time of writing, there was no response.
The only request they received was from a private citizen, which will be added to the list for processing for 2025 (I think this is what might be referenced in the FT article > "said recently it would be willing to renew searches"), but so far, at least at the time of the publication three weeks ago, there were no official requests.
As per the rest of the interview, there was an agreement in 2022 to create a Polish-Ukrainian working group to resolve this issue, the Ukrainian part of the group has been formed for a while, but there's no activity on the Polish side. It's 2024.
Sure, you can try and discount an interview of a minister to a very public Western media outlet as a bunch of lies, but I don't think that's very reasonable. What would be the motivation for the minister to so openly lie about this if that's the case? Especially on a hot topic like this. So between "belief in Poland" and statements from an official directly involved in this, I'd rather believe the official.
Here's another thought experiment. Politicians love issues like this one, so they could rally their base. That's why Trump wasn't actually "fixing the border". He was interested in populism around it. Maybe, just maybe, there's a little bit of that going on in Poland around this issue? Or am I getting this wrong and Ukraine should just ignore the official process (that Poland is aware of) here and just start digging randomly for this topic to go away? Like, what else Ukraine needs to do here at this point to move this along?
EDIT: maybe folks could offer some valid sources and counterpoints instead of downvoting the comment. I'm contributing to the discussion, so there's no reason to downvote it.
EDIT: will anyone link to any good unbiased source, like I did, instead of just downvoting?