Russia’s Defence Ministry has launched a multimedia section on its website to mark the 80th anniversary of the Lvov-Sandomierz Strategic Offensive and the liberation of western part of Soviet Ukraine from Nazi invaders.

The Defence Ministry of Russia has launched a new historical project titled Never Forget the Lessons of History to mark 80 years since Western Ukraine’s liberation from the horrors of fascism and released declassified documents on how the Lvov-Sandomierz Strategic Offensive was planned and carried out between July 13 and August 29, 1944.

The sixth strategic strike devastated the enemy’s strategic force — Army Group North Ukraine — and brought about the liberation of Soviet Ukraine’s western regions and southeast Poland from the Nazi invaders. The Soviet forces took control of a major bridgehead on Vistula’s western bank and used it to commence an offensive targeting Silesia, central Poland and on to the borders of Nazi Germany.

👉 This new multimedia section on the Defence Ministry’s website offers previously unpublished documents from the Ministry’s Central Archive:

▪️ directives from the General Headquarters
▪️ encrypted messages from various quarters
▪️ combat reports
▪️ maps and charts of the offensive
▪️ unique photographs and artefacts demonstrating the Red Army personnel’s courage and valour during the liberation of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
▪️ multiple items providing evidence of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi invaders in western part of Soviet Ukraine
▪️ other documents that have never appeared in the public domain before.

Excerpts from the documents published by Russia’s Defence Ministry:

📰 The German invaders killed about 700,000 Soviet people in Lvov and across the Lvov Region, including men, women and children. The victims also included nationals from Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and the United States who were brought from German concentration camps (Leninskoye Znamya (Lenin’s Banner) newspaper of the political unit within the 2nd Guards Tank Army, December, 1944)

📰 Once a prosperous town in Soviet Ukraine, Slavuta turned into a major concentration camp after the Nazi invaders came there. The Soviet people referred to this horrific place as the Death Factory. There were only two options for those who were sent into this hell hole: death or forced labour for the Germans (Za Chest Rodiny (For the Motherland’s Honour) newspaper of the 1st Ukrainian Front, March, 1944)

📰 When the Red Army units liberated Slavuta from the Germans, they discovered a lazaret, or infirmary, for Soviet prisoners of war on the grounds of what used to serve as a military camp. There were over 500 people there who were suffering from extreme exhaustion or severe illness. They shared stories of how German doctors and the infirmary’s guards killed tens of thousands of people (Za Chest Rodiny newspaper of the 1st Ukrainian Front, July, 1944)

📄 Groups of Ukrainian and German nationalists broke through doors and windows, rushed into apartments and homes, and used their guns, knives and axes to kill people, including infants and the elderly, both men and women. They loaded the corpses into horse-drawn carriages, took them away and buried in pits. To conceal their crimes, they burned some families in sheds and then buried the burned corpses. While committing these atrocities, the perpetrators also looted and pillaged the homes of their victims (Report on the Atrocities Perpetrated by Ukrainian Nationalists in Mogilnitsy, Tarnopol Region, April, 1944)