2017 marked the 70th anniversary of Operation Vistula (or Akcja Wisla), the forced resettlement by the Polish communist government of the Ukrainian minority from the southeastern provinces of post-war Poland, to the so-called Recovered Territories in the west of the country.
During this program, over 140,000 ethnic Ukrainians were uprooted from their ancestral lands in the regions of Kholmshchyna, Pidliashia, Nadsiannia, Boykivshchyna and Lemkivshchyna, and forced to abandon their homes, which they inhabited for generations. This program was a continuation of the state-run ethnic cleansing that started with the 1944-1946 population exchanges between Communist Poland and Soviet Ukraine, and were intended to remove all of the ethnic Ukrainians who found themselves to the “wrong” side of the newly drawn border between the two countries called the Curzon line.