Ukraine marked the 67th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre.
Government officials, diplomats, Holocaust survivors and other Ukrainian Jews on Monday commemorated the killing of tens of thousands of Jews at the site just outside central Kiev in September 1941.
Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and Parliament speaker Arseniy Yatzenyuk both laid flowers at the monument to the victims. Yatzenyuk also took part in a ceremony at the Babi Yar site.
“The memory and the transference to the future generations of these horrible and tragic pages in history is very important for us,” Yatzenyuk said at the ceremony.
President Viktor Yuschenko did not attend because he was on an official visit to the United States.
The ceremony memorialized more than 33,700 Ukrainian Jews killed by Nazis and collaborators. Over the course of several days in September 1941, occupying Nazi troops forced local Jews into the ravine at Babi Yar and shot them.
The Nazis also murdered thousands of Red Army prisoners of war and resistance fighters there.
Tymoshenko and Yatzenyuk also separately placed flowers at the memorial to the Ukrainian National Army underground.
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