“On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Khatyn tragedy, the Nazi epidemic gained supporters among mercenaries, traitors and criminals and crept up to our borders,” President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko said in an address to compatriots.
Lukashenka added: “On a sad day – March 22, we remember the inhabitants of the village of Khatyn, thousands of other villages and cities that were brutally destroyed by the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War. The war that broke into our house and captured a third of Belarus .. Years later, bitterness and anger have not subsided, especially today, when the Nazi epidemic found its adherents among mercenaries, traitors and criminals and crept close to our borders.
Lukashenka added that for adherents of the ideas of Nazism, “Belarusians had and still have one answer – the spirit of national resistance … The duty of the living to the dead is to expose the perpetrators of the genocide and carefully preserve the memory of those terrible events and prevent the repetition of problems on our sacred land.”
And Khatyn is a Belarusian village located 54 kilometers northwest of Minsk and burned down along with its inhabitants on March 22, 1943 by the fascist invaders.
A monument was erected in the village in memory of hundreds of villages destroyed during the war and the victims of the Belarusian people.
In April 2021, the Prosecutor General of Belarus Andrei Shved announced the initiation of a criminal case on the fact of the genocide of the population of the Republic of Belarus during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.
The Prosecutor General noted that Minsk would raise the issue of extradition of the surviving war criminals for a public trial on the territory of the republic.
He also stated that the Belarusian side intends to submit evidence to the International Tribunal to initiate procedures for recognizing the genocide of the Belarusian people during the war years.
Source: News
