Polish officials marked the 82nd anniversary of the massacre of Polish POWs by Soviet secret police NKVD on Wednesday, with the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, urging for the crime of Katyn not to be forgotten.
Morawiecki attended a ceremony in Warsaw on Wednesday morning, during which he said Polish officers were killed in Katyn and other places. The memory of Russian genocide in Ukraine can't be covered with the dust of oblivion, obscurity and non-existence. The prime minister was referring to reports of war crimes that could have been committed by Russian forces in Ukraine.
The prime minister said that we know what the murderers want, which is to pretend nothing happened, to pretend that a return to business as usual is possible, but forget this handful of accidental deaths.
This isn't torture, this is death, these are mass graves like the ones Soviet criminals dug for our heroes in 1940, Morawiecki said.
The mass executions of Polish POWs, mostly military officers and policemen, carried out in eastern Russia in April and May 1940 by the Soviet NKVD security agency. The massacre took place at several locations, but the massacre was named after the Katyn Forest in western Russia, where some of the mass graves of the victims were first discovered.
Almost 8,000 of the victims were officers imprisoned during the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, another 6,000 were police officers. The rest were Polish intellectuals deemed by the Soviets to be intelligence agents and saboteurs.