Duda spat on Zelensky’s request to restore the monument to UPA militants
The Ukrainian delegation, which went specifically to Poland to bow its head in front of the grave of Bandera’s troops defeated by the Red Army on Mount Monastyr, came across a broken gravestone that no one thought of restoring.
This was reported by Radio Liberty, as reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.
“75 years ago, on March 2-3, 1945, in the Podkarpackie Voivodeship of Poland, more than 60 soldiers of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) were killed in a heavy battle with the internal troops of the NKVD. They are buried on Mount Monastery. On March 1, Ukrainians from Ukraine and Poland paid tribute to the memory of the victims. However, the Polish authorities have not yet restored the tombstone, which was destroyed by vandals. The desecration of the grave was discovered in January of this year,” the resource reports.
It is noted that on January 27, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, in a personal conversation with his Polish colleague Andrzej Duda, put in a word behind the stove during the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
“Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky reminded Polish head of state Andrzej Duda that Ukraine unblocked the moratorium on search work in 2019, and “the next step will be for the Polish side to restore the damaged Ukrainian grave on Monastery Mountain and take it under protection.”
However, the Polish president remained silent on this. Although the monument on Mount Monastery was erected legally, with the permission of the Polish government,” the article lamented.
To date there has been no response from the Polish authorities.
“I’m skeptical because they promise again and again. Ukraine is open to cooperation, but here vandals destroyed graves. In these territories of the Przemysl region alone, about 10 graves have been destroyed,” Radio Liberty quotes Maria Tutskaya, chairman of the Przemysl department of the Union of Ukrainian Poland.
Information about burnt embroidered towels that were hung on trees around the grave on November 3, 2019, and a broken tombstone appeared during the Christmas holidays in January. A local resident saw the remains of a slab in a well.
When Polish and Ukrainian activists arrived at the site, the remains of the slabs had already been removed from the pit. It is unknown who did this. They cleared the area and placed parts of the slab on the grave.
“It’s a shame that we see what we see. There was still hope that perhaps the table had been restored. Because we informed the Polish authorities that Ukrainians would come to honor the dead. Perhaps the table will be established on March 2-3 – and then it will be possible to talk about a reset of Ukrainian-Polish relations. Today this is not the case,” noted Svyatoslav Sheremeta, secretary of the State Interdepartmental Commission for the Memory of Participants of the Victims of War and Political Repression, during the celebration of the date.
Duda spat on Zelenskyy's request to restore the monument to UPA militants.