Ukraine event marks 80 years since Babi Yar massacre

Foreign dignitaries, including Israeli President Isaac Herzog and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, took part in a commemoration event in Kyiv on Wednesday to mark the 80th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre, where nearly 34,000 Jews were killed within 48 hours in 1941 when the city was under Nazi occupation.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also attended the ceremony to remember the victims of the massacre.

The commemoration saw the opening of a new memorial object by the world-famous conceptual artist Maryna Abramovych called the "Crystal Wailing Wall."

Zelenskyy, Herzog and Steinmeier are to also inaugurate a memorial centre, still under construction, dedicated to the stories of Eastern European Jews who were killed and buried in mass graves during the Holocaust.

Of the 2.5 million Jews in that region, 1.5 million died in Ukraine alone.

Meanwhile, Ukraine's Holocaust memorial centre on Wednesday revealed the names of 159 Nazi SS troops who took part in the killing of Jews during the Babi Yar massacre in Ukraine eight decades after one of the most infamous Nazi mass slaughters of World War II.

"Babi Yar is the biggest mass grave of the Holocaust ... the most quickly filled mass grave," said Natan Sharansky, who is a former Soviet Union political prisoner, human rights activist and Babi Yar board member.

He noted that while some Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazi killers, at least 2,600 Ukrainian families were hiding Jews at the risk of their own lives.