Poland condemned Russia after it removed Polish military symbols from the cemetery where victims of the Second World War’s Katyn massacre are buried.
Poland’s foreign ministry on May 21 condemned the action, which was ordered by Russian state prosecutors.
Russia had engaged in “historical lies” about the war, said Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski, who demanded that the removed symbols be restored.
The Polish military symbols had disappeared from a Polish war cemetery in Mednoye, which holds the remains of over 6,000 officers murdered in 1940 during the Katyn massacre.
“Unfortunately, our monument to murdered Polish prisoners of war in Mednoye has been vandalised”, he said.
However, “this was not done by vandals”, Sikorski said. “It was done by the authorities of the cemetery complex on the orders of the local prosecutor’s office, and therefore on the orders of the Russian state.”
“We will defend these crosses, because we do not accept Russian historical lies,” added the foreign minister.
The foreign ministry also accused the Russian action of being an attempt to interfere in the ongoing Polish presidential election.
The issue did become a part of Poland’s election debate when Sikorski attacked opposition Conservative (PiS) candidate Karol Nawrocki for failing to react to the Russian action in Mednoye.
Nawrocki is head of the National Institute of Remembrance (IPN), a body charged with the responsibility for examining Poland’s modern history,
The IPN responded a statement saying “the Polish government is responsible for the care of the war cemetery in Miednoje”, not the IPN.
It said “directing expectations towards the IPN, knowing full well that this is the competence of the Polish government, is simply an action of a political nature, related exclusively to the current presidential campaign.”
Russian prosecutors had ordered the removal of the crosses, saying they were “inconsistent with the federal law ‘On Commemoration of the Victory of the Soviet People in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945′”.
That law promulgates a Russian narrative the war began in 1941, when the Soviet Union was invaded by Nazi Germany.
Moscow had, though, previously been allied with Nazi Germany, and the two countries jointly invaded Poland in September 1939.
During the Soviet invasion 22,000 Polish officers were captured in September 1939 and executed in the Katyn forest.
For decades, the Soviet Union denied responsibility for the massacre, claiming Germans had carried it out.
Mikhail Gorbachev accepted, during his time as president of the USSR, that the crime was the work of the Soviet Union.
However, since Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia, Moscow increasingly has tried to excuse the crime by citing alleged Polish mistreatment of prisoners during the war in 1920, when the Poles resisted a Red Army invasion.
Tensions over the issue have grown, with Poland already protesting in 2022 about the removal of Polish flags from Mednoye.
Last year, Poland took Putin to task about a wartime narrative in which he placed some of the blame for the war starting on Poland.
Relations between Poland and Russia been poor since the war started in Ukraine.
This year Poland accused Russia of launching a campaign of sabotage, including a series of arson attacks and closing two Russian consulates in retaliation.
Speaking to reporters, Sikorski claimed the latest closure of a Russian consulate in Poland may also have been a contributing factor to the action taken by Russian authorities in Mednoye.
