The Polish foundation “Freedom and Democracy” is finalizing the formation of a team that will begin exhuming the remains of Poles who died in 1945 in the Ternopil region at the end of April.
According to RMF FM, the mission will consist of around 20 people, including a dozen Poles and several Ukrainian experts. The team will include specialists from various fields: anthropologists, archaeologists, forensic experts, and geneticists. The core of the group will consist of experts from the Pomeranian Medical University in Szczecin, led by Professor Andrzej Ossowski.
Representatives from the Polish Institute of National Remembrance will also be involved, although their role is still being clarified. The trip is planned for the second half of April. A scientific base with tents will be set up on-site, and the team will stay in one of the nearby hotels.
After removing the first layer of soil where the remains were found, shovels and small tools will be used. Individual skeletons will be studied by anthropologists on-site. The goal is to determine the age, gender, and cause of death, including whether it was “violent.” DNA samples will also be collected for comparative research.
Experts from the Pomeranian Medical University have been collecting genetic material from the descendants of the villagers from which the buried individuals in Puzhnyky originated. The exhumation process is expected to last about a month.
At the end of November, the foreign ministers of Poland and Ukraine, Radosław Sikorski and Andriy Sybiha, signed a joint statement in which Ukraine confirmed that there were no obstacles to the search and exhumation work being carried out by Polish institutions and private individuals. In January, it became known that Ukraine had granted permission for the exhumation in the Ternopil region, which will begin in April.
