Mick Hartley

Babi Yar, or Babyn Yar, was perhaps the most notorious of the Nazis' mass killings, when some 30,000 Jews were massacred in a ravine in Kyiv. 

And now we see what Putin really meant when he talked of "denazifying" Ukraine: missiles have struck the Babi Yar memorial.

Russian forces have bombed a memorial to one of the largest massacres of the Holocaust in their intensifying assault on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv.

The Chief of Staff of Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelensky confirmed in a tweet that a missile hit the Kyiv park where the Babyn Yar memorial complex is located.

Just now, a powerful barrage is underway. A missile hit the place where Babyn Yar memorial complex is located! Once again, these barbarians are murdering the victims of Holocaust!

— Andriy Yermak (@AndriyYermak) March 1, 2022

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In a statement, Ukraine's president Zelensky said: "To the world, what is the point of saying 'never again' for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar?" …

The attack was confirmed by the Babyn Yar memorial chairman Natan Sharansky, who said in a statement: “Putin seeking to distort & manipulate the Holocaust to justify an illegal invasion of a sovereign democratic country is utterly abhorrent. It's symbolic he starts attacking Kyiv by bombing the site of Babyn Yar"

Launching the assault on Ukraine last week, Vladimir Putin said that he was 'de-nazifying' Ukraine, despite it being the only country in Europe with both a Jewish president and prime minister.

Babyn Yar is widely considered to be one of the bloodiest massacres in the Holocaust as well as a mass grave for tens of thousands of Jews and Russians killed by the Nazis between 1941 and 1942.

More than 1 million Jewish Ukrainians were killed during the Holocaust including several ancestors of President Zelensky.

From the Times:

Russian missiles struck a television tower next to the burial site of thousands of Jews murdered by the Nazis yesterday as Moscow warned civilians to leave Kyiv before heavy aerial bombardment.

Five members of the same family were burnt alive in the strike, which took out Ukrainian terrestrial television broadcasting across the capital as the Kremlin targeted infrastructure used for what it called “information attacks on Russia”.

The television tower is next to Babyn Yar, the burial site and memorial for more than 30,000 Jews shot by the Nazis after their assault on the city in 1941….

Melinda Simmons, the British ambassador to Ukraine, noting that President Putin had claimed to be removing a “Nazi-led” government in Kyiv, tweeted last night: “In case anyone bought Putin’s ‘denazification’ objective, here’s the stark staring proof of its sickening hollowness.”