Russian envoy withdraws assertion of Polish blame for Nazi invasion

“I regret that I did not made myself clear”.

The Russian ambassador to Poland says he meant no harm when he seemed to suggest that Poland was in part to blame for World War II, says the BBC.

Poland has to make a choice and decide whether to cling to an interpretation of WWII events or to move forward, while keeping history in mind, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said.

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

The Polish military on Monday deployed chemical, radiation and explosives experts to a site in southwestern Poland where a Nazi train allegedly missing since World War II could be located. “Poland was therefore partly responsible for the disaster which then took place”, he said an interview on TVN 24.

The Polish Ministry of the Foreign Affairs said in a statement that it received the envoy’s point of view with “a surprise and anxiety”.

Russian Federation is also angry that Polish officials this month removed a brass relief of a wartime Soviet general, Ivan Chernyakhovsky, from a monument in northern Poland.

The Polish Foreign Ministry also recalls that the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact was officially condemned by the Congress of Soviet Deputies in 1989, still in erstwhile USSR.

The American Jewish Committee denounced the ambassador’s original comments as “absurd”, noting that the Soviet Union and Germany were allies at that start of the war – until Hitler turned on Stalin in 1941 – and that Poles were murdered by both occupying states.

The ambassador’s interview on Friday was broadcast hours after Poland’s ambassador to Moscow, Katarzyna Pelczynska-Nalecz, was herself summoned to the Russian foreign ministry because the graves of 57 Soviet soldiers were vandalised at a cemetery in Milejczyce in north-eastern Poland.