The idea of creating the Second Polish-Ukrainian Communiqué belongs to the renowned Polish historian, long-time director of the KARTA Centre, Zbigniew Gluza. This initiative is an ideological continuation of the First Communiqué, signed by 22 historians from Poland and Ukraine in 1994. It was the first major attempt to seek a common interpretation of the difficult and bloody pages of the history of relations between Poles and Ukrainians in the 20th century.
Unfortunately, over the following decades, that initiative did not receive a continuation, and the difficult questions of shared history became the subject of heated disputes not only between historians but also between politicians, who began to use these contradictions in political struggle.
Facing the full-scale Russian aggression against Ukraine, we understand that any potentially contentious topics between Poles and Ukrainians can and will be used by our common enemy to sow discord. Therefore, the duty of both societies is to minimise the opportunities for such actions – to seek understanding and compromises with each other. Realising this prompted the KARTA Centre to begin work on the Second Polish-Ukrainian Communiqué, which was eventually signed by 24 historians from both countries.
This text not only offers a joint interpretation of the difficult pages of 20th-century history but also introduces a new formula for mutual dialogue on these topics – all victims are ours. We believe that this formula is capable of taking the historical dialogue between Poland and Ukraine to a qualitatively new level.
At the same time, we do not treat the Second Polish-Ukrainian Communiqué as a certain final point concluding the search for a common interpretation of the events of the 20th century. On the contrary – we believe that this text can become the basis for starting a qualitatively new dialogue between both sides. And we will be glad if a potential Third Polish-Ukrainian Communiqué appears much sooner than thirty years after the Second; if even more historians from both sides sign it; if this time the initiator or co-initiator of such a text is a Ukrainian organisation.
The main thing is for this dialogue to continue with the intention of genuine Polish-Ukrainian understanding, and with the realisation that all victims are ours.
Oleksandr Shevchenko
co-coordinator of the project Second Polish-Ukrainian Communiqué
November 2024
We, historians from Poland and Ukraine, accepted the invitation of the KARTA Centre to issue a joint statement on the essence and consequences of the brutal conflict between Poles and Ukrainians in the 20th century, which occurred in the forties. This is a continuation of the First Polish-Ukrainian Communiqué, published in the periodical “Karta” No. 13 in June 1994. Back then, eleven Polish and eleven Ukrainian researchers signed a joint text, which has not been similarly supplemented over the past thirty years.
Regarding the assessment of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict of the 1940s, which claimed many lives, the participants of the 1994 meeting agreed that this is the most tragic page in the history of both peoples.
At the same time, concerning the so-called anti-Polish action – the code name in OUN-B and UPA documents describing attacks on the Polish population of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia (1943–1945), the Polish side believed that “the Ukrainian nationalist underground began activities aimed at the de-Polonisation of the areas of Western Ukraine, including through actions of exterminating the Polish population”. The Ukrainian side stated that “there is no evidence that the UPA command made a decision to exterminate the Polish population”, while the Polish side, in turn, concluded that “despite the lack of documents, facts prove that the entire operation was planned”.
In a comment on the publication of the First Communiqué, the editorial board noted: “Creating a comprehensive expert opinion proved unrealistic – the available knowledge does not yet provide grounds for this. However, the recognition of a common task, as well as differences, in itself becomes a certain form of understanding. We feel that the first stage of joint work is behind us. We perceive this as a starting point. The most important thing is that there should be enough goodwill on both sides. We would like the Communiqué to take the form of an expert opinion one day; for hitherto unknown, undocumented events from our past to be researched and described; for us to be able to write: this is how it was”.
We present the Second Communiqué, in which – after thirty years of continuous research and knowledge gained as a result, particularly from many previously inaccessible documents stored in the archives of Polish and Ukrainian special services, as well as from a ceaseless dialogue of varying intensity between historians during this time, often accompanied by sharp disputes – we can, it seems, unanimously say that in the interpretation of established facts both sides have moved closer to each other. Therefore, we agree with the conclusion formulated as follows.
● Russia's war against Ukraine has changed relations between our societies and sets a key task for researchers of our shared past: to close the historical accounts of mutual grievances, which Kremlin propaganda and groups sympathetic to it are trying to ignite between us, especially now, during the war. We consider the mutual respect currently shown by Poles and Ukrainians towards each other as a basis for understanding in matters of the past. However, this mutual respect is being tested today by Moscow's destructive actions aimed at inflaming the traumas of the recent difficult past not worked through by Poles and Ukrainians. Together we can condemn the greatest crimes committed in the most tragic periods of modern history. We call on both societies to adopt a responsible and open position regarding old mutual hostility.
1.
The events of 1917–1923, particularly the 1917 revolution, the end of World War I and the collapse of the existing geopolitical order, led to a clash of the independence aspirations of Poles and the state-building aspirations of Ukrainians. The essence of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict concerned a dispute over land; a struggle for dominance over territory populated to varying degrees by both peoples. It was also a religious and social antagonism. The basis for future clashes became the question of borders, which were considered unjust initially by Poles, after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918), and later by Ukrainians after the Peace of Riga (1921). Therefore, it was only a matter of time before the two peoples clashed again in a struggle for territories that both Poles and Ukrainians considered their own.
The first collective hostile reflection towards Ukrainians on the Polish side was caused by the Brest-Litovsk Treaty in February 1918, according to which, by the decision of the Central Powers, the Chełm Land and the southern part of Podlasie, territories with a numerical superiority of the Catholic population (identifying as Polish) over the Orthodox (identifying as Ukrainian), were to pass to the newly created Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR). Poles reacted to this agreement by completely severing ties with the Central Powers and, in general, completely switching to the side of the Entente. The proclamation of self-defined borders, primarily the announcement in 1918 of the formation of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic (ZUNR), led to the outbreak of war for Lviv and Eastern Galicia, where the conflict between Poles and Ukrainians had been ripening long before World War I. Additionally, battles for Volhynia with the UPR army took place. The Polish-Ukrainian war of 1918–1919 brought military victory to the Poles, which the Ukrainians did not accept. To some extent, it diverted Ukrainians from the fight against the Bolsheviks, in a certain sense contributing to the defeat of the former and the victory of the latter.
The Polish-Ukrainian alliance against Bolshevik Russia, concluded in April 1920, emerged from Józef Piłsudski’s federalist concepts, which, however, lacked support in the Sejm, where nationalist sentiments dominated. Despite the fact that UPR soldiers participated in the Kiev offensive and fought on Poland’s side during the subsequent Bolshevik counteroffensive, which was halted only near Warsaw, its representatives did not participate in peace negotiations with the Bolsheviks. The UPR delegation was not admitted to work on the Treaty of Riga, signed in March 1921; the Polish side largely recognized Soviet power over Ukraine, except for the western part of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. In 1920, Petliura renounced these lands in exchange for an alliance and a joint struggle against the Bolsheviks for Dnieper Ukraine.
However, the division of Ukrainian lands between Bolshevik Russia and the reborn Polish Republic in 1921 dashed the state-building aspirations of Ukrainians. Despite initial pressure from the great powers on Poland demanding recognition of autonomy for Eastern Galicia and a promise to introduce it, the Polish side ultimately did not keep this promise. In turn, Ukrainian national activists rejected autonomy until the decision of the Conference of Ambassadors, hoping for full independence. The confirmation in March 1923 by the Conference of Ambassadors of the eastern border of the Second Polish Republic deprived Galician Ukrainians of even the promised autonomy.
2.
The period from 1923 to 1939, when the geopolitical situation offered Ukraine practically no chance for independence, did not become a time of Polish-Ukrainian alliance. A significant part of nationally conscious Ukrainians treated the institutions of the Polish state on territories they considered ethnographically Ukrainian lands as a manifestation of occupation. While representatives of Ukrainian political elites declared their loyalty, they never renounced their independence aspirations. Overall, the Ukrainian population, despite the right to equal treatment with citizens of Polish nationality guaranteed by the March Constitution of 1921, effectively felt like second-class citizens throughout the interwar period. After May 1926, Poland, moving towards an authoritarian system, revealed its repressive nature not only towards the Ukrainian minority but also towards compatriots opposing the authorities. The inconsistent and flawed national policy of successive governments of the Second Polish Republic fluctuated between state (Piłsudski) and national (National Democrats) assimilation of Ukrainians. Part of the Polish elites was ready to support the national aspirations of Ukrainians, but outside the borders of the Second Polish Republic. Promethean plans to divide the USSR into many national states were linked to this. Ultimately, in the second half of the 1930s, the nationalist approach to the Ukrainian question in Poland prevailed. It stemmed from a programme of creating “bastions of Polishness” in areas inhabited by an ethnically and politically active Ukrainian element at the expense of reducing the assets of the Orthodox Church (the so-called Polonisation-revindication action).
The barren policy of the authorities of the Second Polish Republic towards national minorities was particularly glaring in the case of Ukrainians. They were the largest national minority in interwar Poland. The authorities of the Second Polish Republic treated most Ukrainians as a community without an established national identity, and therefore largely susceptible to Polonisation, despite significant differences depending on the historical experience of Ukrainians and their territory of residence before 1914 (Eastern Galicia – territory of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, Volhynia and Lublin region – Russian). By this, Polish political elites denied the Ukrainian national movement the right to agency. The argument of force began to dominate mutual relations.
Ukrainian national radicals from the Ukrainian Military Organisation (UVO), and later from the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), began using individual political terror aimed at both representatives of state power and supporters of Polish-Ukrainian understanding, as well as against Ukrainians accused of “collaboration”. They also began carrying out acts of diversion and sabotage. This, in turn, intensified the harsh reaction of the Polish authorities and discriminatory policies towards Ukrainians, which only fuelled the spiral of mutual hostility.
However, the greater part of Ukrainian society was opposed to the use of terror in the struggle for independence.
The pacifications carried out in Ukrainian towns of Eastern Galicia in 1930 using the principle of collective responsibility as a reaction to acts of terrorism by the OUN; repression against Ukrainian activists, imprisonment of OUN members – along with communists, nationalists, socialists, members of peasant parties, citizens of the Second Polish Republic of nationalities other than Ukrainian – without trial in the Bereza Kartuska c Polish military (Volhynia) and civilian (Eastern Galicia) settlements in areas where the majority population was Ukrainian; finally, harsh national policies from the late 1930s (including the destruction of Orthodox churches and cases of forced conversion of Orthodox believers to Catholicism in Volhynia and the Lublin region in 1938) – all this contributed to strengthening Ukrainian hostility towards the Polish state on the eve of the outbreak of World War II.
Attempts to regulate Polish-Ukrainian relations in Volhynia in 1928–1938 (the so-called Volhynian experiment of Henryk Józewski) and in Eastern Galicia in 1935–1938 (the so-called normalisation policy) ended in failure.
Under such circumstances, extreme nationalist forces on both sides strengthened. Public sentiments also radicalised. Even in the face of the growing threat from Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianisms in the 1930s, there was no effective reorientation of the policy of the Second Polish Republic that would attract the Ukrainian minority living there to the Polish state. Integral nationalists saw a chance for Ukrainian independence in a tactical alliance with Germany, which offered hope for overthrowing the “old order” in Europe and – as they believed – was supposed to help them defeat the main enemies of their national cause – the USSR and the Second Polish Republic.
3.
After the attack by the Third Reich and the USSR on Poland in September 1939 and the division of the country between the aggressors, relations between Poles and Ukrainians deteriorated sharply. Despite generally hostile sentiments towards Poland among Ukrainians, during the Polish campaign of 1939, over 100,000 soldiers of Ukrainian nationality fought in the ranks of the Polish Army and fulfilled their soldierly duty.
At the same time, due to the intensification of hostile attitudes by Ukrainian nationalists and communists with the outbreak of war, the conviction of Ukrainian betrayal, numerous acts of diversion and sabotage, as well as subservience to the enemies of Poles – Germans and the Soviet regime – strengthened among Polish society and members of the independence underground.
Events of the later period of war and occupation only reinforced among Poles the conviction that Ukrainians were a dangerous internal enemy. Rapprochement between the two warring peoples was hindered by the position of the Polish government-in-exile and underground leaders within the country, who declared the mandatory return of Polish statehood to its pre-war eastern lands after the war.
Just like the plans of both factions of the OUN (Andriy Melnyk and Stepan Bandera), created at the turn of 1939–1940, to build Ukrainian statehood within borders considered ethnographic, including in the occupied south-eastern territories of the Second Polish Republic. Ukrainian nationalists, like other Ukrainian pro-independence political circles, did not allow for the possibility of restoring the Polish state within the pre-1939 borders, as this contradicted the idea of unity [sobornist], recognized by the OUN, of uniting all ethnographic Ukrainian lands within the borders of an independent state.
Until the beginning of the German-Soviet war in June 1941, the Ukrainian nationalist movement pinned hopes on obtaining an independent state in cooperation with Germany against the USSR. Poles also welcomed the start of the German-Soviet war, assuming that as a result, the two biggest enemies would bleed each other dry. The plans of Ukrainian nationalists for an independent state were shattered in the summer of 1941, when the Germans revealed their true intentions regarding Ukrainian lands. They intended to subject them to a brutal occupation policy, which included, among other things, maximum economic exploitation of conquered territories and starving the local population.
Until the defeat at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942/1943, both Poles and Ukrainians assumed the possibility of repeating the scenario of the end of World War I: simultaneous defeat of Germany and the USSR and the threat of a new Polish-Ukrainian armed conflict for the disputed territories of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia. Therefore, the OUN-B, anticipating the actual state of affairs, decided at the turn of 1942/1943 to create military units and launch a general uprising in Volhynia against all enemies – mainly Poles and Soviet partisans, to a lesser extent – Germans. The Ukrainian nationalist underground treated the latter as retreating and only temporarily occupying the territory of the future independent Ukrainian state. In turn, Poles living in territories with a majority Ukrainian population – in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia – were, in the opinion of the OUN-B, the weakest enemy, and therefore easiest to defeat first.
4.
Hostility between Ukrainians and Poles throughout the conflict-ridden territory (Volhynia, Eastern Galicia, Lublin region) intensified throughout the period of German occupation. In the winter of 1942/1943, the leadership of the OUN-B decided to launch the so-called anti-Polish action in Volhynia. Here it had a particularly bloody character. In Volhynia, it was planned to kill part of the Polish population to force the rest of the Poles to flee.
It must be emphasised that there were Ukrainians who refused to participate in crimes, risking their own lives and the lives of their relatives, helping Polish neighbours persecuted by the Banderite underground. Some of them paid the highest price for their humanity.
The apogee of terror against the Polish population of Volhynia fell on July-August 1943. At that time, large-scale organized attacks by Banderite UPA units, with the participation of part of the local Ukrainian peasants, took place on Polish villages, which were wiped off the face of the earth, and most of their inhabitants killed. From the beginning of the Ukrainian action in Volhynia, local Poles tried to organise local self-defence. Structures of the Home Army also joined the defence of the Polish population. In areas where there was no Home Army, the Polish population of Volhynia saw defenders against UPA attacks in Soviet partisans. The stimulus for anti-Polish terror by the UPA was also cases of collaboration of Poles with Germans, occurring with the same motivation.
From the second half of 1943, the so-called anti-Polish action of the OUN-B and UPA began to gradually encompass the territories of Eastern Galicia and south-eastern Lublin region. It reached its apogee there in the spring of 1944. Unlike Volhynia, where Poles were mass murdered regardless of gender or age, in Eastern Galicia and south-eastern Lublin region the Ukrainian underground planned to kill mainly men, and expel the rest of the Polish population beyond the Bug and San rivers, i.e., from lands considered an integral part of the future Ukrainian state. In case of resistance, however, they did not rule out killing whole families, including women and children, and this also happened in practice.
In response to these crimes, the Polish underground launched terror against the Ukrainian population based on the principle of collective responsibility. Particularly bloody and ruthless were anti-Ukrainian attacks by Home Army units and Peasant Battalions near Hrubieszów in March 1944. They are known in Polish underground documents as the Hrubieszów revolution. Due to the strength of the Polish underground, the territories of south-eastern Lublin region became the only ones during the German occupation in the spring of 1944 to become a theatre of military operations that could be called a Polish-Ukrainian partisan war. The confrontation between Poles and Ukrainians in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943–1944 did not have this character, where armed battles of partisan units of the UPA and AK constituted only a small part of the deployed actions of the Ukrainian underground, aimed mainly against the Polish population.
In many places, attacks on the Polish population took the form of mass crimes committed ruthlessly, regardless of the age and gender of the victims. General estimates of victims to this day are still incomplete and subject to clarification.
It is believed that the so-called anti-Polish action of the OUN-B and UPA from the winter of 1942/1943 to the spring of 1945 led to the death of about 80-100 thousand Poles, including 40-60 thousand in Volhynia, from 20 to over 30 thousand in Eastern Galicia and up to two thousand in the Lublin region. To date, the names of less than half of the victims have been identified.
As a result of anti-Ukrainian actions by the Polish underground, by the spring of 1945 no less than ten thousand Ukrainians died, including two to three thousand in Volhynia, one to two thousand in Eastern Galicia, and the majority – six thousand – on the lands of present-day Poland, including up to four thousand in the Lublin region and two thousand in the Rzeszów region.
Ukrainian partisans forced nearly 400,000 Poles to flee under threat of death, including over 100,000 from Volhynia, over 230,000 from Eastern Galicia, and at least 20,000 from the Lublin region. Also, nearly 20,000 Ukrainians of the Lublin region left their homes for fear of the Polish underground.
A factor in mutual relations that was the source of the so-called anti-Polish actions of the OUN-B and UPA was clearly the national policy of the Germans and Soviets in the occupied south-eastern territories of the Second Polish Republic: Soviet deportations of 1940–1941, the extermination of the Jewish population starting from the summer of 1941, the instrumental use of Polish-Ukrainian antagonism by both occupiers.
They destroyed the existing value system with the cruelty of war times – immorality, normalisation of death and disrespect for human life.
The horrifying events in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943–1945, during which mass crimes against the Polish population took place, and in response to them – destruction of the Ukrainian population on the principle of collective responsibility, became a huge tragedy in Polish-Ukrainian relations. Numerous villages completely disappeared from the map, tens of thousands of victims were anonymously buried in mass graves. Only individuals were buried according to traditions.
5.
After the Red Army occupied Volhynia, Eastern Galicia, the Lublin and Rzeszów regions in the second half of 1944 and established communist rule there, both sides of the conflict began to lose their political and military agency. The hostile attitude of the Soviets and Polish communists towards the independence aspirations of Poland and Ukraine, the struggle of the Soviet and Polish military and apparatus of repression against the Polish and Ukrainian anti-communist underground, accompanied by brutal pacification of villages considered the social and material base of the underground, deprived the Polish-Ukrainian confrontation of any meaning.
Nevertheless, the last so-called anti-Polish actions of the OUN-B and UPA were recorded at the turn of 1944/1945 in Eastern Galicia, and in May 1945 – in the Lublin region. In the first half of 1945, mainly in the Rzeszów region and to a lesser extent in the Lublin region, serious actions against the Ukrainian population by the Polish anti-communist underground of various orientations (from followers of the Home Army, through people's to nationalist) also took place. Most often they were carried out as revenge for crimes against Poles in the Trans-Bug area and aimed at forcing Ukrainian peasants to leave for beyond the Bug.
In the spring of 1945, faced with a common threat and under pressure from both communities tired of fratricidal struggle, recent enemies – followers of the Home Army and Banderites – decided to conclude a truce near Lubaczów in the Rzeszów region and eastern Lublin region. It lasted until 1947 and even led to cooperation at intelligence, propaganda and military levels, including the impressive armed assault by Polish and Ukrainian partisans on the city of Hrubieszów in May 1946. In a sea of immense suffering caused by long-term inter-ethnic conflict, this was a brighter moment.
The imposed Soviet-Polish border on the Bug River was treated by communists on both sides as a dividing line between Ukrainians and Poles. About 500,000 Polish citizens of Ukrainian nationality (including those from the Lemko ethnic group) living on the western side of the river were resettled to the Ukrainian SSR in 1944–1946 at the request and with significant support from Soviet authorities, by the authorities of the Polish People's Republic wholly dependent on Moscow. From the summer of 1945, this happened forcibly, with the help of the Polish Army. The rest, about 140,000, were forcibly resettled by Polish communist authorities, in agreement with the authorities of the USSR and Ukrainian SSR, during Operation “Vistula” (in the spring-summer of 1947) to the northern and western lands of post-war Poland. Victims of Operation “Vistula” were dispersed (until the mid-fifties without the possibility of returning to their native places, and subsequently return was hindered by PPR authorities) and settled surrounded by the Polish population, including displaced persons from Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, for the purpose of forced national assimilation. The ultimate goal of these measures was to transform post-war Poland into a nationally homogenous state. At the same time, until 1947, almost 800,000 Poles were transported from the USSR to Poland.
After 1947, Ukrainians and Lemkos living on Polish lands were subjected to special surveillance by the communist state and, as a group suspected of “Ukrainian nationalism”, were treated as second-class citizens.
Until the fall of communism in Poland (1989) and Ukraine (1991), in official discourse the issue of Polish-Ukrainian relations during the war and in the first post-war years was subject to ideological interpretation.
Now, again facing a common threat from Russia's imperial and nationalist tendencies, Poles and Ukrainians have proven that, despite unresolved and often unworked-through traumas of their difficult shared past, they are capable and willing to help each other. Together we must also close the accounts of mutual grievances.
●
We, the signatories of the Second Communiqué, consider it necessary for both societies to accept the paradigm “all victims are ours” regarding the shared past, which from now on will make impossible a kind of “confrontation of victims”, i.e. dividing them into “ours” and “others”, numerous manipulations and trading in their numbers.
Honouring all victims of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict of the 1940s and worthily commemorating them appears not only as a moral duty but primarily as proof of the maturity of modern and democratic European societies.
We believe that shared attention focused on the victims of past mutual hostility should mean:
– exhumation of nameless mass graves to create cemeteries/necropoleis; Ukraine’s consent to exhumations should not be perceived as the entire nation accepting responsibility for the crimes of the OUN-B and UPA, but as a manifestation of Christian culture and respect for all deceased regardless of their nationality, religion, and political views;
– completing nominal data in databases of victims of mutual conflict, taking into account the old localities from which they came;
– placing information signs along roads with historical names of localities that were erased from space and maps as a result of their complete pacification;
– decisive condemnation and effective counteraction against acts of vandalism against monuments of the other side, including graves in cemeteries of other religions, as well as Russian disinformation in the sphere of historical memory of the difficult Polish-Ukrainian past; Poles and Ukrainians should not fall under the influence (policy) of third parties, but should independently and reflexively evaluate mutual conflict situations, verify historical prejudices and think together about the future of next generations;
– restoring the original form of memorials by agreement of both sides, and finally resolving issues regarding holding commemorative events on both sides of the border;
– returning to the formula of substantive dialogue on the most difficult issues for both peoples concerning the events of 1939–1947, within the framework of an expert forum of historians, which should be established by the authorities of Poland and Ukraine (Ministry of Science or Academy of Sciences, excluding entities /Institute of National Remembrance – Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation and the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory/, which after 2017 became parties to the conflict regarding interpretation of events);
– verifying and supplementing the documentation of 1917–2023, prepared by the KARTA Centre in the context of the 80th anniversary of these crimes under the title “Volhynia 1943 – Apogee”.
Prof. Jan Jacek Bruski (Kraków)
Prof. Rafał Wnuk (Lublin/Gdańsk)
Prof. Yaroslav Hrytsak (Lviv)
Prof. Grzegorz Hryciuk (Wrocław)
Dr. Mariusz Zajączkowski (Warsaw)
Prof. Oleksandr Zaitsev (Lviv)
Prof. Leonid Zashkilniak (Lviv)
Prof. Ihor Ilyushin (Kyiv)
Prof. Zbigniew Karpus (Toruń)
Prof. Michał Klimecki (Toruń)
Prof. Stanislav Kulchytskyi (Kyiv)
Prof. Mykola Kucherepa (Lutsk)
Prof. Oleksandr Lysenko (Kyiv)
Prof. Grzegorz Mazur (Kraków)
Dr. hab. Damian Markowski (Warsaw)
Prof. Włodzimierz Mędrzecki (Warsaw)
Prof. Grzegorz Motyka (Warsaw)
Prof. Jan Pisuliński (Rzeszów)
Prof. Andrii Portnov (Frankfurt an der Oder)
Prof. Stanisław Stępień (Przemyśl)
Prof. Tomasz Stryjek (Warsaw)
Prof. Volodymyr Trofymovych (Ostroh)
Prof. Yuri Shapoval (Kyiv)