Polish prime minister urges to remember Katyn massacre victims

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Polish prime minister urges to remember Katyn massacre victims

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. Just like 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 the murderers wanted to pretend nothing happened, and to pretend that a return to business as usual is possible, but forget this handful of accidental deaths.

This is not torture, this is death, these are mass graves like the ones Soviet criminals dug for our heroes in 1940, Morawiecki said.

The Katyn Forest MassacreKatyn Forest Massacre in western Russia was the result of a series of mass executions of Polish POWs, mainly military officers and policemen, carried out in April and May 1940 by the Soviet NKVD security agency. The massacre took place in several locations, but the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest in western Russia, where some of the mass graves of the victims were first discovered.

More than 8,000 of the victims were officers imprisoned during the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, another 6,000 were police officers and the rest were Polish intellectuals deemed by the Soviets to be intelligence agents and saboteurs.