Ukrainian official prevented from entering Poland

The Ukrainian foreign ministry urgently called in the Polish ambassador to Kiev over the incident, Poland’s PAP news agency reported.

The secretary of the Ukrainian inter-ministerial commission for remembrance, Svyatoslav Sheremeta, discovered he had a ban on entry to Poland when he tried to cross the border at Medyka, south-eastern Poland, around noon on Saturday, Ukrainian media reported.

Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski said earlier this month that officials in Warsaw were planning to ban “individuals with an extremely anti-Polish approach” from entering the country.

He suggested the ban would apply to Ukrainian officials who do not allow Polish experts to continue their search and exhumation work in Ukraine and who are preventing continued work to renovate sites in that country of significance to Poland.

In late October, a Polish expert said that authorities in Ukraine were blocking work by a team of Poles searching for the remains of Polish victims of wartime crimes in that country.

This included problems that Polish researchers are encountering as they search for the burial sites of Polish victims of the so-called Volhynia Massacre in Ukraine, Prof. Krzysztof Szwagrzyk, deputy head of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), said.

(pk)

Source: PAP