We paid too high price for the Ukrainian independence and our freedom. We must remember this - President Poroshenko on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression

"We paid too high price for the Ukrainian independence and our freedom. We must remember this by looking into the past and the future," President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko told during a speech at the ceremony commemorating the victims of political repression on the territory of the Bykivnia Graves State Historical and Memorial Preserve.   

"The multinational burials of the Bykivnia Graves eloquently remind us that the devastating wave of anti-humanist politics in the last century went far beyond the borders of national or other social groups, destroying life and destiny of innocent people on its way," the Head of State said.

Petro Poroshenko stressed: "The joint efforts of the international community must ensure guarantees of preventing the retaliation of totalitarian regimes today and in the future. This is our consolidated responsibility to the descendants. This will be the most worthy tribute to those whose lives have been paid for our peaceful present. For a civilizational advance, for the possibility to build a world space with open borders, for the right of a modern man to develop freely and successfully".

"Being here, in Bykivnia, in a sorrowful and holy place, you incidentally listen to the silence. There are thousands and thousands of tortured and murdered innocent victims here. That were executed and secretly buried in an attempt to ensure that even local residents did not know about those terrible crimes," he said.

According to him, the communist authorities have been concealing those events with a dense blanket of lies and mysteries for decades. "Only through the activity of the dissidents of that time, the first information started to be collected and made public. Until the scale of this horror that was taking place in this forest, which deserves to be called the Ukrainian necropolis, was not realized in the independent Ukraine," the President said.

He noted that the exact data on the number of victims is still not known. "According to scientists, it may be about 30-35 thousand dead, according to some estimates - up to 100 thousand. "Special needs" - this is how the Bolsheviks covered the goal this land. This decision was saved in the archives. Special need to kill. Ukrainian intelligentsia, state and religious leaders, victims of so-called cleanings, former prisoners of war, representatives of Polish, German, Bulgarian, Lithuanian and many other nations - the list of categories of people who have found their last rest here is very long," Petro Poroshenko stressed.

"Eternal memory to all the victims of repression buried in Bykivnia forest. Eternal memory to those buried in other areas of execution in Ukraine and abroad. Eternal memory," Petro Poroshenko emphasized.