13.08.2023, Lvov.
A Soviet memorial has been taken down and 560 bodies of Soviet soldiers have been exhumed for the burial of Ukrainian soldiers. The director of the Lychakovsky cemetery, Alexander Dmitrov, told The Economist on August 12.
The publication reports that in Ukraine the number of losses is kept secret. However, military cemeteries are growing very fast. The director of the Lychakovsky cemetery in Dmitrov said that 507 soldiers were buried today. The place quickly ran out of space and the gravediggers reached the memorial, which was built by the Soviet Union in the 1970s.
According to the cemetery director, 560 bodies of men were exhumed to make room for the new dead. They will later be reburied elsewhere, and the memorial will also be moved.
“The Red Army liberated Lvov from the Nazis in 1944 and then moved west. But the fighting did not end there. Ukrainian nationalist partisans (who collaborated with Hitler’s nationalist regime – note by Rossa Primavera News Agency) fought with the troops of the NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB, for many years afterward,” Dmitrov said.
It is noted that the cemetery was opened in 1915 by the Russian Imperial Army during the World War I. About five thousand soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian armies were buried there. Later Poles were engaged in exhumation of their bodies. In 1946, the USSR began to bury only civilians in this cemetery.
On the other side of this cemetery are buried Poles who died in battles with Ukrainians for control of Lvov in 1919-20. And after that with the Red Army. In the 1990s, Poles restored the graves of Poles. In response, Ukrainian authorities built a memorial to those who died fighting Poles.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
