On 80 years since the Khatyn massacre

(from the briefing by Russian Foreign Ministry
Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, March 16, 2023)

On March 22, we will mark a dark page in the history of the Great Patriotic War. On that day 80 years ago, the Nazi butchers burned the village of Khatyn and its 149 residents, including 75 children, in Belarus. But several witnesses of that horrible and inhuman massacre have survived. Thanks to their testimony, we were able to establish many of the details of that tragedy.

Millions of people not only in Russia and Belarus but around the world remember Khatyn. But it was not the only one to suffer at the hands of Nazi butchers. Tens of thousands of villages and towns in the occupied territories suffered the same fate, like the village of Khatsun in the Bryansk Region.

Not only German war criminals took part in burning Khatyn and shooting its residents. The main perpetrators of that massacre were Nazi accomplices, primarily, Ukrainian collaborators who had pledged allegiance to Hitler. Regrettably, some of them escaped punishment by hiding in the vast expanses of our country or finding shelter in the West, where they felt relatively safe.

The Belarussian investigative authorities, working together with their Russian colleagues, continue to hunt for, find and expose the crimes of the Khatyn butchers in the relevant criminal cases. We believe that such cases do not and cannot have a statute of limitations.

After the Great Patriotic War, we thought that the Nazi plague had been routed and that humanity would never again come up against the cruel manifestations of Nazism. But today it has become necessary to stand up against this threat.

The West is stubbornly ignoring the continuing growth of neo-Nazism in Ukraine and the Baltics and is fostering the spread of Russophobic ideology in the pseudo-democratic regimes it is patronising and among its own citizens. Today’s Ukrainian nationalism has shown its inhuman nature more than once, like during the burning of about 50 civilians in the House of Trade Unions in Odessa on May 2, 2014. Not surprisingly, some media outlets have described this tragedy as “a new Khatyn massacre.”

In this context, there should be no doubt about the justifiable reasons for the special military operation and the vital necessity of achieving its goals and objectives.