This is typical of how Mother Russia treats Ukraine:
The 1941 NKVD Prison Massacres in Western UkraineDuring the German invasion of the USSR, the Soviet Secret Police (NKVD) brutally murdered between 10,000 and 40,000 political prisoners in Western Ukraine over the course of eight days, which sparked waves of ethnic violence following the German occupation of the region.June 7, 2021As the German army began its invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Stalin ordered the Soviet Secret Service (NKVD) to “remove” the prison population in the USSR’s occupied territories rather than allow them to fall into German hands. This was largely accomplished through the mass murder of prisoners at various locations in Western Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, and Lithuania. The majority of the mass executions, later termed “the 1941 NKVD Prison Massacres” by local residents, occurred in Western Ukraine. Due to a lack of reliable sources, exact numbers are impossible to determine; however, historians estimate that the NKVD killed somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 people in dozens of prisons over the course of eight days. The ethnic breakdown of casualties in Western Ukraine roughly corresponded to population demographics: 70 percent of the victims were Ukrainian, 20 percent Polish, and the remainder consisted of Jews and other nationalities.
Western Ukraine, which encompasses the historical regions of Transcarpathia, Eastern Galicia, Volhynia, northern Bukovina, and the western parts of Podolia, had been a part of Poland prior to the outbreak of World War II. Following the joint invasion of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1939, Western Ukraine came under Soviet rule . . .
. . . The Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine was characterized by terror and repression as Stalin immediately embarked on a Sovietization drive that not only included the distribution and display of Soviet insignia and propaganda, but also involved a massive campaign against perceived “enemies of the state.” Due to Stalin’s fear of any national or anti-Soviet elements, hundreds of thousands of suspected political adversaries were arrested, imprisoned, deported to Siberia or Kazakhstan, or executed en masse between February and June 1940. Initial arrests and deportations focused on anti-communists, prewar Polish elites, civil servants, governmental officials, military officers, and Ukrainian nationalists. By April 1940, however, the NKVD began arresting a wide variety of people including family members of those previously convicted, as well as prominent doctors, engineers, lawyers, journalists, artists, university professors, teachers, merchants, and well-to-do farmers. Those that avoided immediate deportation or death sentences remained locked in NKVD prisons when the Germans launched their assault on the Soviet Union.
It is estimated that close to 140,000 political prisoners were being held in prisons throughout Soviet-occupied territories on the eve of Operation Barbarossa. Upon hearing news of the German invasion, the NKVD was ordered to evacuate and liquidate all political prisoners under evacuation order No. 00803.
In Western Ukraine the NKVD started to execute prisoners on the morning of June 23, regardless of whether they had been incarcerated for major offenses or were merely waiting to be questioned. In the central prison in the city of Lutsk, located in the northwestern oblast of Volyn, inmates were crowded and locked into small cells under the pretense of a large-scale evacuation. Shortly thereafter, NKVD officers called inmates by name into the courtyard, lined them up, and began throwing grenades at the group while Soviet tanks fired machine guns. A handful of survivors were then forced to spend the rest of the day digging graves and burying corpses until their overseers fled an advancing German unit. Casualty estimates from the Lutsk prison massacre vary based on sources, ranging from 1,500 to 4,000. . .
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/1941-nkvd-prison-massacres-western-ukraine
