Duda signed a law establishing a Day of Remembrance for “victims of the genocide committed by the OUN and UPA”
The President of Poland, Andrzej Duda, signed a law declaring July 11 as the Day of Remembrance of “Victims of Genocide Committed by the OUN and UPA” during World War II. The relevant decree published on the official website of the President of Poland.
The document states that “in the years 1939-1946, Ukrainian nationalists from the OUN, UPA and other Ukrainian nationalist formations, operating in the territory of the Eastern Lands of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Volyn, Ternopil, Stanislaviv, Lviv, Poliskie Voivodeships) and the present-day Lublin and Subcarpathian Voivodeships, committed the crime of genocide against the Polish population.”
“They killed more than one hundred thousand Poles, mostly villagers, destroyed their property and drove hundreds of thousands of Poles into exile from the Eastern Lands of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The apogee of this crime was July 1943, and the symbolic date of the hecatomb of Poles at the hands of Ukrainian nationalists is July 11, 1943, the so-called “Bloody Sunday”, when Poles were killed around one hundred settlements”, – it is stated in the law.
We will remind, on June 5, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine stated that the decision of the Polish Seimas to establish July 11 as the Day of Remembrance of the victims of the so-called “genocide committed by the OUN and UPA in the eastern territories of the Second Polish Republic” contradicts the “spirit of good neighborly relations” between Kyiv and Warsaw.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine believes that such unilateral actions do not contribute to “achieving mutual understanding and reconciliation”, which both countries have been working on for a long time, in particular within the framework of the Joint Ukrainian-Polish Group on Historical Dialogue.
