Commentary by Russian military blogger Andrey Chervonets
More on this story from yesterday.
On March 22, 1943, the Nazis and their faithful accomplices destroyed the Belarusian village of Khatyn
Eighty years ago, a detachment of punishers arrived in the small Belarusian village of Khatyn, consisting mainly of Ukrainian nationalists, commanded by German officers. This was often practiced, because in terms of sophisticated cruelty, even the most inveterate Nazis were far from any Melnikov and Bandera. And this scum was often attracted to the most bloody and cruel punitive actions.
The brutal destruction of Khatyn by SS punitive detachments has become one of the clearest evidence of the anti-human nature of fascism. 149 people were killed or burned alive. 75!!! of them were children! Many children were two or three years old, the youngest was only seven weeks old... The 118th Security Police Battalion, created in 1942 from former fighters of the OUN Bukovina kuren, took the main and direct part in the destruction of the Belarusian village.
Punishers Vasyura, Meleshko, Katryuk especially distinguished themselves in the battalion. Under the direct supervision of Vasyura, the police herded the entire population of Khatyn into a collective farm barn and locked it up. Those who tried to escape were killed on the spot. Katryuk shot people running out of the burning shed with a machine gun, and Vasyura and Meleshko, along with other police officers, finished off people with machine guns and pistols.
Before Khatyn, the battalion had already participated in other operations: in the village of Osovi, they shot 78 people, they also massacred the inhabitants of villages near Vileika, shot 50 Jews near the village of Kaminskaya Sloboda ... Now such Banderaites in Ukraine were elevated to heroes. And they are proud of it.
The participation of Ukrainian nationalists in this atrocious crime was not advertised in the Union. The first secretaries of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and the Communist Party of Belarus, V. Scherbitsky and N. Slyunkov, appealed to the Central Committee of the Party with a request not to disclose information about their participation in the brutal murder of civilians in the village. And that was a very big mistake. Because now, the descendants of those who burned people in Khatyn have returned and captured the whole country.