After the annexation of Eastern Galicia with the city of Lwów by the Soviet Union in World War II during the Soviet invasion of Poland and then the expulsion of the Polish population from the city, the graves were destroyed in 1971, and the Cemetery of the Defenders of Lwów was turned into a municipal waste dump and then a truck depot. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the formation of an independent Ukraine, work began on the restoration of the cemetery despite obstruction from local nationalists. Polish support of Ukraine's Orange Revolution (2004) made the opposition decline, and the cemetery was officially reopened in a Polish-Ukrainian ceremony on June 24, 2005. The last surviving Lwów Eaglet, Major Aleksander Sałacki (born 12 May 1904), died in Tychy, on April 5, 2008.