Volunteer excavation team during the excavation of mass graves. According to officials of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the team consisted of 40 unidentified civil society groups who were allegedly shelled in Snegnoe, Ukraine on August 19, 2021. Killed in. (Photo: Alexander Usenko/Anadolu via Getty Images)
- The remains of 5,000 to 8,000 people were found in Ukraine, believed to be victims of Stalin’s terrorist activities.
- This is one of the largest mass graves found in Ukraine so far.
- With the increase of excavation work, the number of victims may increase.
Local authorities said on Wednesday that thousands of remains believed to be victims of Stalin’s terrorist attack were found in the southern Ukrainian city of Odessa.
Bones of 5,000 to 8,000 people were found in more than 20 graves near Odessa Airport, making it one of the largest mass graves unearthed in Ukraine to date.
Serge Gusalyuk, head of the regional branch of the National Memory Institute, believes that they were executed in the 1930s by Stalin’s infamous NKVD secret police force, the predecessor of the KGB in the late Soviet era.
Gusariuk told AFP that as the excavation continues, the number of victims may increase.
He said that as part of a plan to expand the airport’s territory, the remains were discovered after the exploratory work began.
He added that some mass graves had been unearthed in the area in the past few years.
The nationalities of the prisoners and the crimes for which they were sentenced to death remain unknown.
But the historian said that the execution dates back to 1937-39, a period of time known as Stalin’s Great Terror.
Read also | Canada mourns 215 children after remains found at Aboriginal school
Gusaryuk said that because documents from that era were classified and kept in Moscow, the identity of the victim could not be determined.
“Under the leadership of the current Russian government, these documents will never be handed over to us,” he said.
Since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and supported armed separatists in eastern Ukraine, relations between the countries of the former Soviet Union have deteriorated sharply.
According to estimates by Ukrainian historians, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were imprisoned or executed in the Gulag concentration camp during the Stalinist repression in the 1930s.
One of the most famous places of execution was the forest near the village of Bykivnia on the outskirts of Kiev, where tens of thousands of victims were buried between 1937 and 1941.
Millions of Ukrainians also lost their lives in the Great Famine from 1932 to 1933, which Ukraine believed was a genocide planned by Stalin.
