The very fact of transferring prisoner of war camps to management by the USSR's NKVD was contrary to the law. At the Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov camps, a number of international law standards defining the status of prisoners of war were not observed. From the very beginning the prisoners were not intended to be released after the end of military activity, as it is required by the Hague Convention. [...] In early spring 1940, the extermination of Polish prisoners of war, legitimized by the Political Bureau of the All-Union Communist Party-Bolsheviks' (VKP(b)) CC was carried out according to a specific pattern and assumed a total character.
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The murder in April-May 1940 of 14,522 Polish prisoners of war from the Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov camps under the NKVD management of the Smolensk, Kalinin and Kharkov Oblasts and of 7,305 prisoners, who were remanded in custody by the NKVD of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine, followed by a mass deportation of their families deep into the USSR, was the gravest crime against peace and humanity. It was a war crime for which responsibility should be borne by Stalin and other members of the VKP(b) CC's Political Bureau who adopted a resolution on the mass annihilation of innocent people. Responsibility also rests with the executors of the crime from the NKVD leadership: Merkulov, Kobulov, Bashtakov, and Soprunenko, as well as the functionaries of the NKVD of the USSR, the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR and the NKVD of the Belarusian SSR who took part in the preparation and implementation of that criminal decision as various levels. [...]
In line with the Convention for the Non-Application of Statutory Limitations to Crimes against Peace, War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity, the above mentioned persons, guilty of the murder of 14,522 Polish prisoners of war from the Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov camps of the NKVD USSR and 7,305 Poles kept in prisons in the camps of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine, should be called to account in court in accordance with the internal legislation for an illegal abuse of power - Article 171 of the Penal Code of the RFSSR of 1929 - which had led to a deliberate murder - Article 102 of the Penal Code of the RFSSR - on a particularly large scale, which should be treated as genocide.
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All the [above mentioned] Polish prisoners of war [...] are subject to full rehabilitation as innocent victims of Stalinist repressions to be accompanied by a fair compensation for moral and material losses.
Moscow, 2 August 1993
Rosja a Katyń [Russia and Katyń], "Biuletyn HAI", special issue, Warsaw 1994