MOSCOW, March 11: Russian prosecutors who investigated the 1940 execution of nearly 15,000 Polish prisoners of war by Soviet security forces said on Friday the killings were not genocide.

Poland has long pushed for Moscow to bring to account those responsible for the Katyn massacre of Polish officers, with victims’ families and Polish war crimes prosecutors calling for the killings to be treated as genocide.

Russian investigators closed the case last year, however, without pressing any charges.

“The version of genocide was examined, and it is my firm conviction that there is absolutely no basis to talk about this in judicial terms,” Chief Military Prosecutor Alexander Savenkov told a news conference.

“There is not, and was not, genocide committed against the Polish people ... in this case,” Savenkov was quoted by the RIA Novosti news agency as telling reporters.

Savenkov’s comments were likely to irritate already strained relations between Poland, a newly-assertive member of the European Union, and Russia, which in its former guise as the Soviet Union dominated Poland for five decades.

President Vladimir Putin chided Poland for backing Ukraine’s recent “orange revolution”, while only this week Poland’s Foreign Ministry called the killing of Chechen separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov by Russian security forces a “crime”.

The mass shootings of interned Polish officers followed the 1939 partition of Poland by Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin at the start of World War Two.

Nazi Germany later reneged on the pact, invading the Soviet Union in 1941. Advancing forces found thousands of bodies in mass graves in the Katyn forest near Smolensk in western Russia.

Soviet propagandists initially blamed the killings on the Germans, however, and it was only in 1990 that President Mikhail Gorbachev admitted the Soviet NKVD secret police had been responsible.

Russian investigations into the case dragged on for over a decade, ending inconclusively last year and prompting Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, a war crimes body, to open its own probe in December.

Russia promised to hand over documents related to the case, but dismayed Poland by saying it would not release classified material. Savenkov said 67 of 183 case files would be given to the Poles soon, while the rest would remain under wraps.—Reuters