Ukraine summons Polish ambassador as row over troubled history deepens

Ukraine has summoned the Polish ambassador in Kiev after Poland denied entry to a Ukrainian official. Warsaw refused entry to the head of Ukraine’s commemoration commission, Svyatoslav Sheremet. The decision was a response to a ban on the exhumation of Poles killed in Ukraine during World War II issued by Kiev earlier this year. “I have been also informed that this is a problem that concerns the restarting of exhumations because Sheremet is the person responsible for this,” Polish Ambassador to Ukraine Jan Piekło said, adding that both sides had agreed that the exhumations should be restarted. The ties between two countries became strained last year, when the Polish parliament declared the World War Two-era killing of about 100,000 Polish men, women and children by units in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) “genocide.” When Kiev made the decision to stop the exhumation process, Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski warned that people “with an extremely anti-Polish approach would be banned from entering the country.