Polish President Andrzej Duda said on Sunday, April 10, that he would bring the Katyn massacre – the murder of nearly 22,000 Poles by Stalin’s police in 1940 – to international courts.
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†Genocide has no recipe. Therefore, I will demand that this case be decided by international tribunals. We will be making appropriate requests soonAndrzej Duda announced in a speech on the occasion of the 82nd anniversary of the massacre, also referring to “Russia’s Brutal Aggression Against Independent and Democratic Ukraine†This crime must be brought to justice and the perpetrators identifiedhe added, without specifying which court he intended to seize and who the defendants would be.
22,000 Polish officers killed
This date also coincides with the 12th anniversary of the Smolensk air crash that killed 96 people on April 10, 2010, including Polish President Lech Kaczynski who traveled to Russia to pay tribute to the victims of the Katyn massacre. After the invasion by the USSR in September 1939 of the Polish eastern regions under the German-Soviet pact, 22,000 Polish officers, prisoners of the Red Army, were shot in the Katyn forest and in Mednoye (Russia), as well as in Kharkov ( Ukraine).
For decades, the Soviet Union blamed the Nazis for this massacre. It was not until April 1990 that the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, acknowledged his country’s responsibility for these massacres. †It was a crime of genocide committed by the Soviets on completely helpless victims. He has never been punished. Instead we have Katyn’s lie‘ said Andrzej Duda.
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He named “a brief episode in the early 1990s under President Boris Yeltsin, when it was finally accepted that the »Stalinist authorities« were responsible for the Katyn massacre“. But, he continued, “no further action taken. The Katyn investigation was halted and none of the perpetrators were ever punished. While Putin’s Russia once again glorified Stalin and the Soviet Union for years. Katyn’s lie is in favor again‘ said the Polish president again.
