During the requiem service for 134 victims of Soviet terror (1939-1941) celebrated by local clergy in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, March 24, 2018. Yuriy Rylchuk/Ukrinform/Abaca
REPORT – In Ivano-Frankivsk, the memory of the massacres of the NKVD, the communist secret police, merges with that of the aggression of Putin’s army.
Special envoy for Ivano-Frankivsk
On the outskirts of the city of Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine stands a small monument surrounded by five crosses that commemorates terrible crimes. This was carried out by the Soviet political police NKVD against the Ukrainian population in the summer of 1941, while Hitler’s army was preparing to invade the USSR and especially Ukrainian Galicia, which was part of Poland until 1939.
On the outskirts of the city of Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine stands a small monument surrounded by five crosses that commemorates terrible crimes. Laure Mandeville / Le Figaro
In an ancient forested ravine called Demianiv Laz, the Soviet secret police NKVD, which had moved into the city following the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the annexation of western Ukraine, brutally tortured and murdered hundreds of Ukrainians before throwing them into mass graves. “Like today, they tried to eradicate Ukrainian culture. As soon as they arrived in 1939, they began to arrest all nationalist activists, all members of the Ukrainian cultural intelligentsia, priests… They took…
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