Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his Polish counterpart Bronislaw Komorowski have unveiled a monument commemorating the victims of totalitarianism on the premises of the Bykivnia Graves National Historic-Memorial Reserve (Kyiv region).
The two presidents laid flowers at the monument, the memorial sign at the Polish graves and the common grave, an Interfax-Ukraine correspondent has reported.
"By jointly exposing and condemning the crimes of the Stalin era and restoring historical justice, we fulfill both our duty to the perished and our duty to the coming generations," Yanukovych said.
Memories of those terrible times unite the Polish and Ukrainian people, the president said.
Komorowski, for his part, said that Warsaw had long been looking forward to this moment.
The Stalin-led regime sought to destroy both people and their memory, the Polish president said.
"The victims' relatives protected the truth about Katyn," he said.
Thousands of people executed in Kyiv were buried by the Soviet secret police NKVD in the Bykivnia forest, located outside the Ukrainian capital, in the 1930s.
The Bykivnia Graves memorial center was opened in 1994 and was turned into a state historical and memorial reserve in 2001. It became a national reserve in 2006.
