Ukrainian Officials Discover Remains of Thousands of People Believed to be Victims of Stalin's Reign

UKRAINE-POLAND-HISTORY-POLITICS — Veterans lay flowers and light candles in front of a memorial to Polish victims as they take part in a ceremony during which Poland's President and his Ukrainian counterpart unveiled a memorial to thousands of Polish officers murdered in 1940 by Stalin's secret police and buried in a mass grave outside Kiev, on Septemer 21, 2012. The mass graves in Bykivnia forest outside Kiev are believed to contain 100,000 victims of Stalin's repressions, including 3,500 Polish officers killed by the NKVD in the so-called Katyn massacre ordered by Stalin. AFP PHOTO/INNA SOKOLOVSKA / Photo credit should read INNA SOKOLOVSKAYA/AFP/GettyImages

Ukrainian officials reported the discovery of a mass grave where the bones of about 5,000 to 8,000 people were buried, individuals who are believed to be victims of Joseph Stalin during his reign from 1937 to 1939.

Historians believe that the thousands of victims were executed by Stalin's NKVD secret police unit. However, they said that the individuals' crimes and identities have not yet been determined.

Ukraine's Mass Grave

Officials are continuing their excavations of the burial site which could lead to the discovery of more victims, Sergiy Gutsalyuk, the head of the regional branch of the National Memory Institute, said.

The human remains were found after exploratory works that aimed to expand the airport's territory were started in the area. In previous years, officials also discovered mass graves in the area.

The National Historic Memorial site is one of the famous mass graves found in the country and houses the Bykivnia graves on the outskirts of Kyiv. Officials discovered the site in the 1990s and estimated that it contained the bodies of anywhere from dozens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of humans, MSN reported.

Stalin's Great Terror was estimated to have resulted in the death of about 950,000 to 1.2 million people during the leader's rule. Historians believe that hundreds of thousands of victims lost their lives in Ukraine. Over 8,500 lives were sentenced to death by the NKVD from 1938 to 1941.

Authorities have no exact estimation of the number of Soviet citizens who became victims of Stalin's dictatorial rule. But the Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow said that at least 12 million innocent lives were either jailed or executed in the Soviet Union from the 1930s to the 1950s.

The Russian capital's Gulag History Museum, on the other hand, said about 20 million were victims of the time and noted that about one million people were executed, RFERL reported.

Brutality of Stalin's Rule

The Holodomor, or also known as the "Terror Famine," resulted in the death of millions of Ukrainian residents from 1932 to 1933. Many have considered that period to be a genocide orchestrated by Stalin.

Gutsalyuk said it was not possible to identify the victims in the mass graves as documents from that era were classified and stored in Moscow. He noted that the Russian government would never hand over the documents to them.

Currently, Russia and Ukraine are engaged in the Russo-Ukrainian War which has been ongoing since 2014. The incident was ignited after the Russian annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. It was also due to Russian authorities supporting armed separatists who were stationed in the eastern parts of Ukraine.

This week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, announced his commitment to take back the peninsula of Crimea and urged international allies to support him. During a speech at the Crimean Platform summit, Zelensky said his government would utilize all of its political, legal, and diplomatic means to make Crimea part of Europe.

The summit was attended by top officials from 46 different countries and blocs, including the United States, the European Union, and Turkey, Independent reported.