Mateusz Morawiecki, Poland's prime minister, was among dignitaries at a ceremony on Sunday to mark the 77th anniversary of the so-called Augustow Roundup operation which saw at least 592 Polish freedom activists murdered by Russia's NKVD and SMERSH forces in 1945.
The desecrated memorial site in the village of Kaczycze, in the Grodno region of Belarus, was the final resting place for 89 Polish Home Army (AK) soldiers killed during a battle against Soviet NKVD forces near Raviny, Belarus, in January 1945.
Activists from the western Russian city of Smolensk have petitioned the country's parliament, the Duma, to demolish a symbolic memorial site to the Katyn massacre and a cemetery for its victims, Russian daily Kommersant has reported.
Polish officials marked the 82nd anniversary of the massacre of Polish POWs by the Soviet secret police NKVD on Wednesday, with the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, urging for the crime of Katyn not to be forgotten.
The 1940 Katyn Massacre of over 20,000 Polish POWs by the Soviets should go before an international tribunal as a case of genocide, Poland's president said in a Sunday address published on social media.
WARNING! GRAPHIC IMAGES: As the world reels in horror from Russian atrocities in Ukraine, leading historians and others have been drawing parallels with the 1940 Katyń massacre which saw over 20,000 Poles murdered by Stalin’s secret police.
In this episode of The Debrief, we are in the newly opened Sybir Memorial Museum in the city of Białystok, which aims to highlight centuries of Russian and Soviet deportations to Siberia.
The building in the centre of Augustów in north-east Poland was used by the NKVD and the Communist secret police to hold and interrogate victims of the 1945 Augustów Roundups, known as the little Katyń.
The moving entries written on scraps, notebooks and loose sheets of paper, reveal the everyday lives of the victims, revealing their thoughts, plans and dreams unaware of their fate.
Opening to coincide with the anniversary of Stalin’s invasion of Poland on 17 September, 1939, the Sybir Memorial Museum is the largest and most important institution dealing with deportations to Russia and later the Soviet Union.
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