Exhumation work at a Soviet-era military cemetery in Drohobych, a city in the western part of Ukraine, has revealed a significant discrepancy between official records and actual remains, according to the city council's Department of Culture and Tourism Development.
The memorial site, located at the intersection of Sambirska and Ivan Franko streets, was officially documented as containing 135 bodies in 18 graves. However, search teams from the communal enterprise "Dolya" of Lviv Oblast Council recovered only 20 sets of human remains — both military and civilian.
The cemetery was established in the 1960s and bore the full name "Cemetery where Soviet soldiers who fell in battles for the liberation of Drohobych from Nazi invaders in August 1944 are buried." The exhumation work began in September after the city council received approval from the International Committee of the Red Cross.
"According to accounting documentation, the subject of protection of this cultural heritage site was 18 graves with tombstones, where according to archival materials 135 people were buried. However, according to the results of search and exhumation work, 20 human remains (military and civilian) were found," the city council reported.
Among the initial discoveries was a severed skeleton damaged during memorial construction in the 1970s. The site contained several individual graves, with the remainder classified as mass burials.
Bohdan Lazorako, director of the Nahuyevychi Reserve, has been investigating the memorial's documentation and highlighted fabrications in the burial records. He pointed to a 1955 registry entry for "occupant" Ivanov-Sayenko Ivan Oleksandrovych.
"In the 1955 register, the falsification of records in the album occurred at such a rapid pace that one of the 'occupiers' Ivanov-Sayenko Ivan Oleksandrovych (8.09.1844-15.11.1945) was 101 years old when he died 'from the hands of German-Ukrainian nationalists,'" Lazorako wrote.
The historian argues that Soviet propaganda deliberately inflated casualty figures to magnify the scale of August-September 1944 fighting with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army near Pidbuzhia, Storona, Nahuyevychi, and Urozha. According to Lazorako, bodies of occupiers not recovered from forests due to intense fighting between NKVD forces and UPA in the Carpathians and foothill villages were never actually buried at the newly created Soviet cemetery.
"The recorded names and surnames of casualties were simply added to the stelae without bodies," Lazorako noted. He added that several people were buried in individual graves at different times until 1947, transforming them into "mass graves" of NKVD agents killed by UPA forces.
The exhumation also yielded artifacts from earlier centuries on the site.
In related developments, Ukraine has committed to not obstructing Polish efforts to search for and exhume victims of the Volyn Tragedy. This was discussed during a meeting between Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski and his Ukrainian counterpart Andrii Sybiha.