Katyn Remembered

That the Parliament notes that 5 March 2020 marks the 80th anniversary of the order being given for the Katyn massacre, involving the mass executions of 21,857 Polish officers and intelligentsia carried out by the Soviet People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) in April and May 1940; understands that the massacre was initiated by NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria's proposal to execute all captive members of the Polish officer corps and approved by the Soviet Politburo led by Joseph Stalin; recognises that the victims included pilots, government representatives, academics and 300 doctors; further recognises that, of those killed, about 8,000 were officers imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers and that the murdered included ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Jews such as the Chief Rabbi of the Polish Army, Baruch Steinberg; notes that, though the killings also occurred in Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest, where mass graves were first discovered by Nazi Germany in 1943, after which the USSR claimed the Nazis had killed the victims and continued to deny responsibility for the massacres until 1990, when it officially acknowledged and condemned the killings by the NKVD, as well as the subsequent cover-up by the Soviet government; acknowledges that the Katyn Massacre left a deep scar in Polish-Soviet relations during the remainder of the Second World War and subsequently, and that it was not until November 2010 that the State Duma (the lower house of the Russian Federal Assembly) officially declared that Joseph Stalin and other Soviet leaders were responsible for ordering the execution of the Polish officers at Katyn, and believes that these events, the lives tragically lost and impact on the Polish people should be remembered for generations to come.