Some 8,000 bodies from the Great Stalinist Purge found in Ukraine

The remains emerged after authorities ordered preventive searches before allowing the expansion of the airport, as mass graves have been found in the area in the past.

Gutsaliuk said that many victims, residents of the region, were shot in the neck by members of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD, according to its Russian acronym, ancestor of the KGB), in executions dating back to 1937-39, during the so-called Stalinist Great Purge.

The official also observed that the victims cannot be identified because the documents related to these events are filed in Moscow and Russia “will not give them” to Ukraine due to the difficult relations between the two nations since the annexation of the Crimean peninsula by Russia in 2014.

Excavations in the same area in 1943 and 2008 resulted in the exhumation of around 1,600 bodies, Gutsaliuk added.

According to the estimates of historians of UkraineHundreds of thousands of the country’s residents were executed or imprisoned in Gulag forced labor camps during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s.

One of the best-known execution sites was the forest near the city of Bykivnia, on the outskirts of Kiev, where tens of thousands of victims were buried in the years 1937-1941.

Millions of Ukrainians in turn died of the great famine of 1932-1933 (called “the holodomor”), a “genocide” orchestrated by Joseph Stalin, according to Ukraine, to suppress the nationalist or independence aspirations of this nation, which was then part of the Soviet Union.