Moscow, May 6 (Interfax) - Poland hopes that an over 100-volume criminal dossier on the Katyn massacre will be declassified and these events will be legally qualified as a crime.
"It is difficult for us to understand that the majority of documents and files in the Katyn criminal case are classified and the reluctance to qualify these events as crimes," Wojciech Materski, an historian and member of the Russian-Polish Group for Difficult Issues, said during a televised link-up between Moscow and Warsaw on Thursday.
"[Poland] sees all this as an attempt to cover up this event, and we will be trying to overcome all that," he said.
For his part, Wladyslaw Stempniak, advisor to the Polish Archives Director, said he had doubts about Russia’s claim that the files regarding repression victims were destroyed.
"The information about the destruction of the personal files of about 21,000 people appears very dubious to us," Stempniak said.
Meanwhile, Gennady Matveyev, a Russian member of the Russian-Polish Group for Difficult Issues, told his Polish counterpart about Poland’s failure to meet its obligation to investigate the deaths of nearly 28,000 Soviet Army officers in Polish camps in 1919-1921.
"It seems to me, the Polish side does not remember very well its own obligations, in particular, its obligation to provide us with material about the deaths of Red Army soldiers held in Polish camps during the Soviet-Polish war," Matveyev said.
