Polish president demands truth on Volhynia anniversary: 'We do not agree to forget 120,000 murdered Poles'

Memorial ceremonies across two countries

Poland held memorials in Radruż (south-eastern Poland) and Ołyka (western Ukraine) on 11 July 2026 to mark the 83rd anniversary of the 1943 Volhynia massacres. The date recalls the so-called “bloody Sunday” when coordinated attacks by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) hit roughly one hundred Polish villages. President Karol Nawrocki chose the Zespół Cerkiewny in Radruż, a village where nine people were killed in the first mass murder there on 23 April 1944 and over twenty more lost their lives in the area between 1944 and 1946.

Nawrocki invokes Herbert and rejects UPA flag

Nawrocki opened his address with a line from poet Zbigniew Herbert, telling the crowd that “ignorance about the disappeared undermines the reality of the world.” He then tied the memory directly to current European identity.

We do not agree to forget about 120,000 Poles, civilians, women, children, murdered in a brutal way by Ukrainian nationalists.

The president insisted the red-and-black flag of the UPA has no place in a united Europe and told the assembly “we do not want it in Poland.” He described how on 11 July 1943 families went to Sunday mass praying for a good future and instead met “brutal death,” and that household tools “became instruments of death.” Nawrocki stressed he assigns culpability to Bandera ideology and the perpetrators, not the entire Ukrainian nation, and recalled that elements of the Ukrainian auxiliary police had earlier taken part in the persecution and murder of Jews.

Kosiniak-Kamysz speaks in Ołyka

Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz attended the mourning ceremony in Ołyka, Volhynia oblast. He framed his remarks around the triad of truth, commemoration and forgiveness.

Friendship is telling each other the truth, even the difficult truth. Friendship is moving forward together despite the experiences of the past – or perhaps thanks to those experiences, building a better future.

The deputy prime minister called exhumation and dignified burial a matter of extraordinary importance and said commemoration must not be “stitched with hatred” but “sewn from love.” He addressed the Ukrainian side directly, stating he arrived with a sign of peace as to friends among whom one speaks honestly, and stressed that understanding on the other side is vital for Poland today.

Tusk announces Wall of Memory

Prime Minister Donald Tusk released a video statement announcing that a Wall of Memory will be erected in Warsaw, carrying an eternal flame and the names of every found and identified victim. Tusk said the list would include victims of the Volhynia crime as well as other Polish victims of 20th-century wars on the territory of Ukraine. He declared he has taken action to resume, after years, the search and exhumation of victims who still lack a dignified burial.

Diplomat mentions Ukrainian victims while rejecting symmetry

Polish chargé d’affaires in Ukraine Piotr Łukasiewicz, attending the Ołyka ceremony, drew attention to Ukrainian victims of violence by the Polish state on territories of the former Second Polish Republic before and during the war. He qualified the statement immediately.

I am not creating symmetry nor putting an equals sign between the numbers and the quality of suffering. I am simply saying that we remember, and must remember, the past and what in that past was shameful and unworthy.

The diplomat described everything that happened during the Second World War as “terrible and unnecessary.” His intervention added a further layer to the public conversation on a day that is one of the most sensitive in the Polish-Ukrainian calendar.