Andrii Sybiha took to Facebook to convey his thoughts following talks in Poland on Wednesday.
One of the key subjects was how to deal with the remains of the victims of the Volhynia Massacre, an issue which still casts a shadow over bilateral relations despite the strong bonds between the two countries forged by Poland’s unwavering support for Ukraine in its war with Russia.
A series of killings by Ukrainian nationalists lasting from 1943 to 1945 in regions of modern-day Ukraine, the massacre claimed the lives of an estimated 100,000 Polish men, women, and children.
Poland views the massacre as genocide while Ukraine has been divided on how to classify the killings, with some historians framing it as part of a broader Polish-Ukrainian conflict.
Warsaw has long campaigned for its investigators to be given full access in Ukraine to exhume massacre victims. But Ukraine’s refusal to grant permission has been an occasional source of tension between Warsaw and Kyiv.
Last month, talks between Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, were described by a foreign ministry source in Warsaw as “chilly,” after the Polish top diplomat raised the subject of exhumation and burial of massacre victims.
But earlier this week, Ukraine’s Institute of National Memory said it would begin searching for the remains of victims following individual requests from their family members.
This bottom-up initiative, which had little or no high-level government involvement, may help to remove the political emotion from the issue and provide a “technical” framework to resolve the dispute.
Hinting at this while referring to “sensitive topics of the past,” Sybiha said in his Facebook post: “Ukraine is ready to talk to Poland on all topics, because true friends can openly discuss everything among themselves. And not only talk, but also solve problems, discuss specific technical, not political steps, to finally resolve the issue of exhumation, which has been poisoning our political dialogue for a long time.
“The past, however complex it is, cannot threaten the present confrontation to common challenges and the future in the Euro-Atlantic family. I am convinced that this is our common understanding with the Polish side,” he added.
Sikorski has said he is waiting to see if talks with Ukraine over exhumations will “bear fruit.”
“We don’t want to annoy Ukraine with this; we just want our alliance to be free of this sensitive issue,” he continued, adding that Kyiv had “hinted” that it wanted to settle the issue.
