Observed annually on April 13, the Katyn massacre involved the systematic killing of Polish officers and war prisoners by the Soviets between April and May 1940.

“We gather here, as we do every year, in these early days of April, since this museum was established, to pay tribute to them, but also to remind the whole world of this terrible crime. A crime that is indeed genocide,” Duda emphasized.

“There is no doubt that Stalin, the leader of the Soviet state, wanted to eliminate the Polish elite. They wanted to effectively begin the extermination of the Polish nation,” the President said.

President Duda visited the Katyn Museum in the Warsaw Citadel, laying flowers at the Katyn Epitaph. He emphasized the significance of the Katyn massacre, noting that over 22,000 Polish individuals, including intellectuals, officers, activists, and officials, were brutally murdered, primarily through execution by gunshot at the back of the head.

The massacre, although named after the Katyn Forest, where some mass graves were uncovered, occurred at multiple locations, including the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons. Approximately 8,000 victims were officers captured after the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, with another 6,000 being police officers and the remainder comprising Polish intellectuals.

For decades, the Soviets denied responsibility for the killings, attributing them to the Germans until 1990, when they officially acknowledged NKVD involvement.

While Soviet culpability was confirmed by investigations conducted by the Prosecutors General of the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, Russia has resisted labeling the Katyn killings as war crimes or genocide.