KYIV, Ukraine—Last week, Ukraine commemorated the 75th anniversary of the Nazi massacre at the Babyn Yar ravine outside of Kyiv.
From September 29, 1941, until September 1943, the Nazis murdered 100,000 people at Babyn Yar, also known as Babi Yar in Russian. Of the dead, more than 50,000 were Jews. The other victims comprised gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, Ukrainian nationalists, and ethnic minorities.
Thursday’s commemoration ceremony at the site of the mass grave marked the culmination of a week of events in Ukraine memorializing the anniversary of the Nazi massacre.
The weeklong series of memorials were part of an effort to illuminate a piece of Ukrainian history that was diminished in importance by the Soviet Union.
Among the speakers at Thursday’s event were Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, European Council President Donald Tusk, German President Joachim Gauck, and French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy.
Speakers memorialized the more than 100,000 victims, while also alluding to ongoing humanitarian crises in eastern Ukraine and Syria due to renewed tensions between Russian and Western Europe—which some say are reflective of the same ideological conflicts that sparked World War II.
