Russia’s Poland Envoy Backtracks On WWII Remarks

Russia’s ambassador to Poland is due today to explain his comments that Warsaw “bears partial responsibility” for the outbreak of the Second World War, after having being summoned by the Polish foreign ministry, The Telegraph reports.

Ties have sharply deteriorated in recent years, and the government in Warsaw has sharply criticised Russia’s conduct in Ukraine.

The Polish Foreign Ministry expressed a strong protest in connection with a TV interview in which Andreyev also blamed Poland for what he described as “Polish-Russian relations being in the worst state since 1945”.

However, his comments to Russian media later made clear that there was unlikely to be any immediate improvement in relations.

“I was not accurate enough in my interview, and that’s what triggered the Polish reaction”, he said. There had been no discussion about his possible expulsion from Poland, he added.

Andreyev had been summoned by the Polish foreign ministry after he told private broadcaster TVN24 on Friday that Poland was partly responsible for Nazi Germany invading in 1939 because it had repeatedly blocked the formation of a coalition against Berlin in the run-up to the conflict.

“We regard this as a lack of respect for the memory of victims of NKVD [Soviet secret police] crimes, perpetrated on the orders of the highest Soviet authorities”, Polish Foreign Ministry press spokesman Marcin Wojciechowski said in a statement, referring to the repression which followed the Soviet invasion.

Polish military experts arrive at a spot in in southwestern Poland…

It also notes that the military aggression of Hitler’s Third Reich against Poland and the subsequent entry of Soviet Red Army forces from the east in September 1939 were the result of the earlier signed Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact which had outlined spheres of Nazi and Soviet influence in Central Europe. The vandalism was strongly condemned by the Polish government.

In other incidents that have caused tensions, the graves of Soviet soldiers in Poland were recently vandalized and a Polish town dismantled a monument to a Soviet World War II general.