Victims of Katyn Tragedy Commemorated

In Kharkiv, at the Ukrainian-Polish Memorial of Victims of the Totalitarian Regime, the victims of the Katyn tragedy and the air crash near Smolensk were commemorated.  

According to Unian.net, the ceremony of laying flowers and the Divine Service were attended by the First Deputy of the Kharkiv Regional State Administration, Volodymyr Babaiev, First Deputy of the Kharkiv Mayor, Oleksandr Kryvtsov, Consul General of Poland in Kharkiv, yan Granat, representatives of the Kharkiv Regional State Administration City Council, diplomats, clergymen and members of Polish organizations.   

Information:

The Tupolev Tu-154 plane with 96 people on board, including the official Polish delegation led by President Lech Kaczynski, crashed while attempting to land in heavy fog in the Smolensk region at 10:50 a.m. Moscow time on April 10, 2010. There were no survivors.

The Katyn massacre is the mass shootings of Polish citizens, mostly captive officers of the Polish Army in spring, 1940 by NKVD police. According to a memo of the head of KGB, Shelepin (1959), all in all, 21 857 persons were shot, including  4 421 in Katyn, 3 820 in the Starobelsk camp near Kharkiv,  6 311 in Ostashkiv Camp (Kalinin Region) and 7 305 persons in camps and prisons of Western Ukraine and Belarus.