Human remains exhumed at WWII massacre site in Ukraine

Beneath two now-deserted villages in western Ukraine — the site of World War II-era massacres — archaeologists are uncovering the bones at the heart of a dispute that has strained relations between Warsaw and Kyiv for years.

Disagreements over what happened and who is responsible for the Volyn massacres have long cast a shadow over ties between the otherwise now close neighbors.

Between 1943 and 1945, tens of thousands of civilians were killed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in territory occupied by Nazi Germany, according to Polish estimates of the toll.

Warsaw calls it a "genocide" against the Polish minority, while Ukraine hails the UPA as freedom fighters, sees the events as a wartime "tragedy" and says that Ukrainians were killed in retaliation.

The exact number of people killed at the time remains contested, but Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) estimates that about 100,000 people died in the 1943-45 anti-Polish campaign in the Volhynia, Eastern Galicia and Lublin regions. The institute also estimates that at least 10,000 died in Polish attacks of retaliation.

Amid sunflower fields and forests, joint Polish-Ukrainian teams of archaeologists have been carefully excavating the remains of victims.

"We want to restore their first and last names ... to fulfil the duty that rests on us as heirs of those who were murdered here," said Karol Polejowski, deputy president of the IPN.

The remains of over 50 people have been recovered in a series of exhumations taking place in the area, but they have yet to be identified.

A handmade wooden cross, planted near the graves, is one of the few signs that the villages ever existed.

Political leaders in both countries believe the exhumations can be a first step in repairing relations, which have been strained this year by a rift triggered when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy named a military unit after the UPA.

In a white tent around six miles from the Polish border, experts meticulously lay out the skeletons of recovered victims, measuring bones and carefully trying to match broken skull fragments.

A small number of other artefacts — rosaries, religious medallions and shoes — have also been unearthed under the field of yellow-and-black sunflowers, one of the national symbols of Ukraine.

"The remains were arranged in a highly disordered manner. Most of the bodies had been brought to the burial pit and simply dumped into it," Olga Mineiko, an anthropologist at the Ukrainian Memorial and Search Center, told AFP on the site.

The victims were likely "driven to the field of death b