Kyiv recognizes forced resettlement of 700,000 Ukrainians from communist Poland as deportation
President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a law on July 29 recognizing Ukrainians forcibly resettled from communist Poland between 1944 and 1951 as deported citizens of Ukraine.
Under agreements with the Soviet Union, the Polish communist regime expelled around 700,000 Ukrainians from their homes from 1944-1951. The largest phase of resettlement, Operation Vistula, was carried out in 1947, with 140,000 Ukrainians relocated to northern and western Poland.
The new law provides compensation for material and moral damages incurred by victims of deportation and their descendants. It recognizes the expulsion of Ukrainians from the Lemko, Nadsyany, Kholm, Southern Podlaise, Lyubachiv, and Western Boyko regions as illegal and criminal acts of deportation by the Soviet Union and Polish People's Republic.
The draft law was first introduced in 2019, but took years of debate, revisions, and parliamentary hearings before it entered into force.
"It is good that, step by step, legal and historical clarity is being added to these issues, and most importantly, without scandals and politicization of history," Anton Drobovych, former head of the National Memory Institute, wrote on Facebook.
Re-evaluations of historical legacies continue to play a major role in modern relations between Ukraine and Poland. The amended deportation law comes only weeks after Poland passed legislation establishing July 11 as the National Day of Remembrance for Polish victims of the Volyn massacres, one of the most painful and contentious chapters in Polish-Ukrainian history.
The Volyn (Volynian) massacres of 1943-1944 took place in the Nazi-occupied territory of what is now western Ukraine during World War II. Members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) killed at least tens of thousands of Poles, while thousands of Ukrainians were killed in retaliation.
The commemoration and exhumation of the victims have been subject to ongoing negotiations. Polish President-elect Karol Nawrocki, a historian, has long argued that Ukraine should not be allowed into the EU before the Volyn issue is resolved, a view shared by other Polish politicians across the political spectrum.
