Russian and Polish prime ministers honour the WWII Katyn massacre

In an unprecedented move, the Russian and Polish prime ministers on Wednesday 7th April honoured together 22,000 Polish officers murdered 70 years ago by the Soviets in the WWII Katyn massacre.



Russia's Vladimir Putin and Poland's Donald Tusk paid their respects to Soviet victims of Stalinist-era terror campaigns buried next to Polish officers in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk, western Russia.

Soviet NKVD secret police massacred Polish military elites mobilised to combat Nazi Germany's September 1, 1939 attack on Poland after they were captured by the Red Army following its September 17 invasion from the east.

Although the slaughter was committed in several places, Katyn has become its chief symbol.
It also represents what was perhaps the most flagrant lie proffered for half a century by Soviet propaganda, which long claimed Nazi Germany was to blame.

Although in 1990 then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev admitted that Moscow was responsible, even today few Russians -- long fed on Soviet propaganda -- know the truth about Katyn.

The memory of Katyn remains a painful issue in Polish-Russian relations, which have often been tense since Poland peacefully threw off communism and Soviet dominance in 1989, joining NATO in 1999 and the EU in 2004.

Russian courts have classified the vast majority of files in the Katyn massacre case, making it impossible to access information that could prove helpful in finding those still missing.

On March 5, the Russian NGO "Memorial" called on President Dmitry Medvedev to reopen the investigation into this "war crime and crime against humanity".

As a sign of the new openness on this question earlier this month, Russia's public Kultura television channel aired "Katyn", a film by Polish director Andrzej Wajda about the massacre.

After the ceremonies at the cemetery in Katyn, Putin and Tusk had a face-to-face talk in nearby Smolensk during a meeting of a joint task-force on "difficult issues" in bilateral relations.

Among the most contentious issues, was Poland's decision to host US Patriot missiles on its soil and the possible involvement of Warsaw in the new version of a planned US missile shield.
Both are the source of considerable concern for the Kremlin.

Poland for its part has opposed the joint Russian-German NordStream project to build a natural gas pipeline across the Baltic Sea floor, thus bypassing Polish territory. Warsaw sees this as a threat to its energy security, not to mention lost gas transit earnings.