Home › Politics › What Lutsk commemoration meant for Kyiv and Warsaw
What Lutsk commemoration meant for Kyiv and Warsaw
Summary
A joint ceremony in Lutsk on 9 July 2023 placed remembrance of the 1943 Volhynia massacres at the centre of Polish–Ukrainian relations.
What did it mean when the presidents of Poland and Ukraine stood together in Lutsk on 9 July 2023? The ceremony, held at the Saint Peter and Paul Cathedral, was a joint act of remembrance for the victims of the 1943 massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.
Polish President Andrzej Duda and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy took part in person, and the venue lay on Ukrainian soil. That setting made the commemoration a shared public gesture on the subject of the massacres, as the two leaders honoured the dead together.
A busy stretch for Kyiv
The ceremony came days after other developments that shaped Kyiv's agenda. On 3 July 2023, Russian drone attacks on Sumy killed two people and injured 19. In response, Zelenskyy called for a major upgrade of Ukraine's anti-aircraft defences.
On the same day, Zelenskyy asked Georgia's ambassador, Gela Dumbadze, to return home within 48 hours to negotiate the transfer of Mikheil Saakashvili to a Ukrainian clinic. Saakashvili, an imprisoned former Georgian president and a Ukrainian citizen, was in declining health.
Why it matters
Taken together, these episodes show Ukraine's leadership handling several fronts at once: wartime air defence, a diplomatic dispute with Tbilisi over a Ukrainian citizen, and a memory issue with a close neighbour, Poland. The Lutsk ceremony was the one of the three that directly involved both Warsaw and Kyiv at the highest level.
