KYIV: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday visited the site of the Babi Yar massacre to mark the 82nd anniversary of one of the largest mass murders of Jews in the Holocaust.
Zelensky, dressed in his usual olive-green attire, placed a candle at the historic site and said Ukraine would “never” forget the tragedy perpetrated by Nazi Germany.
“No matter how many years have passed, humanity will remember the lives taken by Nazism,” Zelensky, who is of Jewish descent, said in a statement on social media.
“And it will always remember that this evil was punished.”
On September 29-30, 1941, around 34,000 adults and children, most of them Jews, were killed at the Babi Yar ravine outside Nazi-occupied Kyiv, the capital of ex-Soviet Ukraine.
Babi Yar, also called Babyn Yar, was the scene of mass executions until 1943. Up to 100,000 people were killed there, including Jews, Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war.
Ukraine marks the grim anniversary as Russia’s invasion of the pro-Western country drags into its second year.
In June, Kyiv launched a counter-offensive but has acknowledged slow progress as its forces encounter lines of heavily fortified Russian defences.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has tasked a former aide of late Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin to oversee volunteer fighter units in Ukraine, according to a Kremlin statement on Friday.
“At the last meeting we talked about you overseeing the formation of volunteer units that can carry out various tasks, first and foremost of course in the zone of the special military operation,”
Putin was quoted as saying to Andrei Troshev, using Moscow’s name for its offensive in Ukraine.
The meeting, also attended by Deputy Defence Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, underlined the integration of fighters from the mercenary Wagner Group into Russia’s regular military in the wake of Prigozhin’s aborted mutiny in June.
Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner mercenary group, died with nine other people when a plane flying from Moscow to Saint Petersburg crashed on August 23.
Exactly two months earlier, Prigozhin had openly challenged Russia’s military high command by leading a short-lived mutiny with his fighters that threatened to spiral into civil conflict.
Observers have said this was the most significant challenge to Putin’s rule.
Prigozhin called off the rebellion after apparently striking a deal with the Kremlin through the mediation of Belarus but he faced no criminal prosecution.
Troshev, a retired colonel known by the nickname “Sedoi” (Gray-haired), hails from Putin’s hometown of Saint Petersburg and is a decorated veteran of Kremlin campaigns in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Syria.
He was one of the leaders of the Wagner Group in Syria, for which the European Union put him on its sanctions list in December 2021.
Russia claimed on Friday that it had destroyed 11 Ukrainian drones overnight, though one UAV dropped explosives on a substation, cutting the local power supply, a regional governor said.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said Friday that the European Union would need to tackle “very long and difficult questions” before the bloc could even start accession talks with war-torn Ukraine.
Hungary has strained relations with Ukraine and has vowed to hold up Kyiv’s efforts toward EU and NATO integration.
EU members are due to decide soon whether to launch formal membership talks with Kyiv.
“I think we have very long and difficult questions to answer before we get to the point where we can even decide to start negotiations,” Orban told state radio.
Ukraine applied for EU membership just days after Russia’s invasion on February 24, 2022, and received candidacy status several months later in a strong signal of support from Brussels.
Around 200,000 ethnic Hungarians live in Ukraine, almost all in the Transcarpathia region which belonged to Hungary before World War I.
