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Russian Ambassador to Poland Sergey Andreev said that amid Poland’s increasingly hostile rhetoric about the far-fetched “Russian threat,” its attempts to belittle the role of Soviet soldiers who liberated Poland and the concentration camps on its territory from the Nazis appear to be speculative and amateurish.
“I cannot judge to what extent people in Poland believe in the realness of the threat of an attack by Russia. It seems that basic logic should tell them that Russia has neither reason nor the intention to do so. Yet, the topic of ‘the Russian threat’ is constantly being pumped up in the Polish political and information space, and it cannot but affect people’s worldview and mood,” Andreev said.
Another contemporary Polish discourse, which the ambassador described as “irresponsible speculations of amateurs or of people who deliberately distort history,” is that the Soviet soldiers deliberately delayed the liberation of Warsaw and the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1945.
Despite some 600,000 Soviet soldiers and officers losing their lives when liberating Poland during World War II, the number of monuments dedicated to their memory has dropped from 561 in 1997 to slightly over 100 now, according to Andreev.
“Today’s Poland denies that our soldiers liberated this country and denies them of military honors; it [Poland] would apparently want even more of our soldiers to have died on this soil,” the ambassador said.
He went on to say that the heated exchanges regarding the interpretation of history severely limited the ability of Moscow and Warsaw to engage in meaningful political dialogue. He further recalled that there used to be a bilateral group run by the Russian and Polish foreign ministries that would discuss such complicated historic matters, but that it ceased to exist after the dialogue was stalled by Warsaw.
Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Szymon Szynkowski vel Sek said in January that his country was ready to revive the group, but according to the Russian ambassador, current disagreements will certainly hold the group back from negotiating anything substantial.
