Polish President Bronisław Komorowski visited the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, near the Russian border on Saturday to commemorate the 1940 massacre of nearly 4,000 Polish officers by the Soviet secret police NKVD.
Komorowski along with Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov and some 400 relatives of the Polish victims attended a memorial service and wreath-laying ceremony at a former prison building and a cemetery where some 3,800 of the murdered officers are buried.
In Ukraine, NKVD agents took the Polish officers from the Starobelsk camp near Kharkiv, shot them in the inner NKVD Kharkiv prison and buried their bodies near Pitykhatky village, outside of the city.
According to declassified WWII documents, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin approved a proposal by NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria, dated March 5, 1940, to execute all members of the Polish Officer Corps.
The executions took place in various parts of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The largest slaughter occurred in the Katyn forest near the Russian city of Smolensk.
On April 10 the then-Polish President Lech Kaczynski, his wife Maria and other 94 top Polish officials were killed in a plane crash near Smolensk airport when going for Katyn massacre commemorations.
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