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.

Poland expects Ukraine to make the first move toward de-escalating the diplomatic crisis between the two countries, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said at a press conference on 4 July, Polsat News reported.

Warsaw had received conciliatory signals from current and former Ukrainian officials, he said, among them former president Viktor Yushchenko, who wrote him what Tusk called a heartfelt letter urging both sides to keep the past from governing the future.

The standoff has hardened into a mutual rupture between two wartime allies at a moment Ukraine can ill afford one. Poland is the main transit route for Western arms reaching the front and a decisive voice on Ukraine's bid to join the European Union, and Polish and Ukrainian civil-society groups, along with historians on both sides, have warned that the feud serves only Moscow.

What Tusk said

Tusk did not spell out what concrete step Warsaw wants, saying only that it would be good to hear a clear signal from Kyiv and that Ukraine was making an effort. He again called President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's decision that triggered the rupture an unfortunate one. A day earlier, on 3 July, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski met his Ukrainian counterpart Andrii Sybiha in Warsaw, the first movement between the governments before Tusk's remarks.

How the rupture unfolded

The crisis began on 26 May, when Zelenskyy signed a decree granting the honorary title "Heroes of the UPA" to a special operations unit, the Separate Center of Special Operations "Pivnich." President Karol Nawrocki responded on 19 June by stripping Zelenskyy of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest state honor. Zelenskyy mailed it back the next day; Warsaw confirmed the decoration's return and said it would be archived permanently. Three former Ukrainian presidents renounced their own White Eagles in protest.

The dispute over the UPA

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army is one of the most contested subjects in Polish-Ukrainian memory. In Poland it is blamed for the massacres of Polish civilians in Volhynia in 1943–1945, which Warsaw recognizes as genocide; Polish historians say UPA units attacked around 150 Polish-inhabited localities in the region in July 1943 alone. In Ukraine, the UPA is widely seen as a movement that fought both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union for national independence, and Ukrainian historians tend to frame the killings as part of a broader wartime conflict in which both sides bore responsibility.

Kyiv has shown no sign of reversing the unit's name. A June survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found 90% of Ukrainians favor a constructive approach to the historical disputes — 57% saying each country should keep its own heroes without interference, and just 5% backing a confrontational line.