President of Ukraine urges to revise the amendments to the Polish legislation regarding the Institute of National Remembrance

President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko urges to revise the amendments to the Polish legislation regarding the Institute of National Remembrance, particularly the provisions on Ukrainians. It was stated by the President in the course of the working trip to Poland during the opening of the Memorial to Ukrainians killed by the Polish “farmers’ battalions” and the units of the Home Army in 1944 in Sahryń village.

"We are against unilateral political assessments of the common historical past, as they do not contribute to the process of our historical reconciliation. We support the initiatives to revise the well-known amendments to the Polish legislation on the Institute of National Remembrance - and we expect that the provisions concerning the assessment of Ukrainians will be revised," Petro Poroshenko stressed.

The Head of State emphasized: “We stand for the professional dialogue of historians and are against politicization of acute issues of the common historic past”.

The President also confirmed the commitment of the Ukrainian side to the political agreements reached at the meeting with Polish President Andrzej Duda in Kharkiv last December on the unblocking of the Polish search and exhumation work in the territory of Ukraine. "We hope that in the near future our experts will begin the relevant work," he added.

"We reaffirmed the high principles of strategic partnership between free Ukraine and free Poland with President of Poland Andrzej Duda in a joint declaration on August 24, 2016, on the day of the 25th anniversary of our independence, when for the first time the President of Poland, our fraternal country, stood next to me, the President of Ukraine, on the Independence Square. And this is a symbol of relations between Ukraine and Poland, which I would like to see everywhere," Petro Poroshenko said.

He noted that the events in Chełm region, just as several other tragic conflicts between Ukrainians and Poles during the World War II, needs thorough historic research. "And these studies should be jointly undertaken by historians and scholars, both Ukrainian and Polish, on the basis of a genuine desire to establish historical truth about the causes, course and consequences of the conflict, no matter how bitter the truth may be for each of the parties. Our nations deserved the right to know the truth. But it is definitely not politicians who should deal with this truth. There are historians and scholars for that. We have agreed on this and we will never allow politicizing these pages of our history," the President emphasized.