Poland forming team for exhumation in Ukraine's Ternopil Oblast

The Polish Freedom and Democracy Foundation is finalising the composition of a mission that is to begin exhuming the remains of Poles in Ternopil Oblast, located in Ukraine’s west, at the end of April.

As reported by Polish radio station RMF FM, a team of around 20 people, consisting of ten Poles and several Ukrainian experts, will exhume the remains of Poles who died in 1945 and were buried in the former village of Puzhnyky.

In addition to the representatives of the Freedom and Democracy Foundation, the team will include anthropologists, archaeologists, forensic experts and a geneticist. Leading the mission will be experts from the Pomeranian Medical University in Szczecin, under the direction of Professor Andrzej Ossowski.

Representatives of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance have also volunteered to join. Their roles in the exhumation process are currently being determined.

The mission is scheduled for the second half of April. A research base with tents will be set up on-site and the team will be accommodated in a nearby hotel.

Once the first layer of soil is mechanically removed at the site where human remains were found, shovels and spades will be used for further excavation. Anthropologists will examine each individual skeleton on-site.

The goal is to determine the age, gender, and cause of death, including whether it was violent. DNA samples will also be collected for comparative analysis.

For several months, Pomeranian Medical University experts have been gathering genetic samples from the descendants of the residents of the village from which the individuals found in Puzhnyky are assumed to have descended.

Exhumation work is planned to last about a month.

In late November, the foreign ministers of Poland and Ukraine, Radosław Sikorski and Andrii Sybiha, issued a joint statement on the exhumation issue. Ukraine confirmed there were no obstacles to Polish state institutions and private organisations conducting search and exhumation work. 

In January, it was reported that Ukraine had allowed the exhumation of the remains of Poles in Ternopil Oblast, which will begin in April.

In 2023, then-Prime Minister of Poland, Mateusz Morawiecki, visited Puzhnyky in Ternopil Oblast, where Polish and Ukrainian experts discovered a grave containing the bodies of villagers who were murdered in 1945.