Polish investigators said Wednesday they have recovered the remains of more than 50 victims of the WWII-era Volhynia massacres during excavations at two former villages in western Ukraine.

The recoveries come as Warsaw renews its demand for permission to conduct searches at additional burial sites.

Karol Polejowski, deputy head of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, or IPN, said the remains of 49 victims had been uncovered during the first two weeks of work at Wola Ostrowiecka and Ostrowki in Ukraine’s Volyn region.

At least four additional victims were subsequently found in another burial pit, taking the number recovered during the current operation to more than 50, he added.

The excavations are the latest stage of the decades-long effort to locate and identify people killed in the two predominantly Polish villages by Ukrainian nationalists in August 1943.

Previous searches conducted in 1992, 2011 and 2015 led to the recovery and reburial of the remains of 674 victims. Investigators believe that nearly 300 victims from the two villages remain missing.

“We are still missing nearly 300 victims here, and we will continue searching for them,” Polejowski told reporters at the excavation site.

The IPN plans to hold a funeral ceremony Aug. 30, the anniversary of the killings in Wola Ostrowiecka and Ostrowki, at a nearby cemetery dedicated to victims of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA. The ceremony will require approval from Ukrainian authorities.

Polejowski said Ukraine is still considering 14 Polish applications for additional searches submitted in 2025.

The Volhynia massacres were a campaign of mass killings carried out mainly in 1943 and 1944 by the UPA and other Ukrainian nationalist formations against Polish civilians in territories that had belonged to pre-war Poland and are now largely part of western Ukraine.

Historians estimate that as many as 60,000 Poles were killed in Volhynia, with tens of thousands more murdered in neighboring Eastern Galicia. Thousands of Ukrainians were also killed in retaliatory actions by Polish forces.

The massacres remain among the most sensitive historical issues in Polish-Ukrainian relations. Poland officially describes the campaign as genocide, while the interpretation of the killings and the commemoration of UPA figures continue to generate disputes between Warsaw and Kyiv. (AA)

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