What 28 April 2025 showed about war, law and memory
A Kyiv court verdict, a Kremlin ceasefire announcement and a Polish excavation marked a day when Ukraine's past and present met.
What did 28 April 2025 reveal about the way Ukraine's past keeps pressing on its present? Three separate reports from that day and the one before it, taken together, offer a partial answer.
On 28 April 2025, a Ukrainian court sentenced former president Viktor Yanukovych in absentia to 15 years in prison. The charges concerned incitement of Ukrainian officials to desertion and the organisation of an illegal crossing of the border with Russia during his flight in 2014. The verdict dealt with events more than a decade old, and it was delivered while the country was still at war with the state to which he had fled.
The same day, Russian president Vladimir Putin declared a three-day ceasefire in Ukraine for 8–10 May, to mark Victory Day, the commemoration of the Second World War. The announcement tied a pause in the current invasion to a historical anniversary, and it set a narrow window rather than an open-ended halt.
The third item came a day earlier, on 27 April 2025. Polish investigators began excavating a Second World War mass grave in Puźniki. It contains victims of the Volhynia massacres, in which Ukrainian nationalists murdered around 100,000 civilians, predominantly Polish. The massacres were carried out from 1943 to 1945 by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army with the support of parts of the local Ukrainian population, against Poles in Volhynia, Eastern Galicia, parts of Polesia and the Lublin region.
Three ways of handling the past
Each report shows a different relationship with history. The Kyiv court treated a 2014 flight as a matter for criminal accountability. The Kremlin used a wartime anniversary as the occasion for a short declared truce. In Puźniki, forensic work on a wartime grave continued the examination of crimes committed eight decades earlier.
The common thread is that Second World War memory and the aftermath of 2014 remained live matters in public life. For Ukraine, the excavation in particular placed a painful chapter of shared history with a neighbouring state on the agenda, alongside the demands of a continuing war.
