Russia removes commemorative plaques from Polish massacre memorial
Plaques depicting the Virtuti Militari Cross and the Defensive War of 1939 Cross have been removed from the Polish war cemetery in Katyn, in the Smolensk district of western Russia, the cemetery’s administrative authority has announced.
According to the statement, the removal was ordered by the Smolensk district prosecutor, citing reasons connected to the need for preservation of cultural heritage monuments and commemoration of the victory in the Great Patriotic War, as Russia calls World War Two.
The decision followed an appeal by a representative of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation which consistently questions Soviet Russia's responsibility for the Katyn massacre, where thousands of Polish officers and officials were executed by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, in 1940.
On Wednesday afternoon, a spokesperson for the Polish foreign ministry, Maciej Wewior, wrote on X that Poland had already delivered a firm protest against the removal of the plaques to a Russian representative in Poland.
In May 2025, similar commemorative plaques were removed from a monument at the Polish War Cemetery in Mednoye, another location where Polish victims of the massacre are buried.
The Katyn massacre was a mass execution of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers, police, and members of the intelligentsia carried out by NKVD in the spring of 1940. The victims, taken prisoner after the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in 1939, were murdered in several locations, including the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, as well as Mednoye and Kharkiv.
For decades, the Soviet Union denied responsibility, falsely blaming Nazi Germany, until officially admitting its role in 1990. The massacre remains one of the most painful episodes in Polish-Russian relations. (PAP)
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