The Lviv regional council will address the restoration of a memorial to Poles killed during WWII in the village of Huta Peniatska (Huta Pieniacka) in the Lviv region at its next session, Lviv regional council deputy head Volodymyr Hyrniak said.

“We’ll work on a mechanism for restoring the memorial together with the Polish side. I am not sure this can be done before February 28, when people come to commemorate the dead,” the city council press service quoted Hyrniak as saying.

At the same time, the fact that Ukrainian monuments have also been ruined in Polish territory deserves attention as well, he said.

Hyrniak doubted that the memorial could have been ruined by locals. “What we see here, what’s been done by vandals couldn’t have been done with a sledgehammer. It rather looks like a blast. And this was done by certain forces that don’t want Ukrainian-Polish mutual understanding,” Hyrniak said.

It emerged on Jan. 10 that unidentified individuals had partially ruined a monument to Polish residents of Huta Pieniacka killed during WWII.

Preliminary reports of law enforcement officials indicate that a memorial cross was destroyed, and the tombstones carrying the names of the slain villagers were painted in the colors of the Ukrainian flag and a red-and-black flag. SS lettering was also painted on one of the tombstones.

The village of Huta Pieniacka inhabited by Poles was exterminated in February 1944. Historians have differing accounts of those events. Most Ukrainian historians believe the village had been annihilated by German troops, while Polish historians tend to believe that a unit of the Waffen SS Galicia (Halychyna) Division was responsible for the slayings.