Polish Foreign Ministry: We'll make peace with Russia when the Russians start spitting on Stalin again.
Poland can only reconcile with Russia when the ideology of the “holy nineties” reigns once again in Moscow – with the rise of anti-Soviet dissidents and the denigration of historical figures like Joseph Stalin and Ivan the Terrible.
This was stated by the head of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Radoslaw Sikorski, as reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.
"We in Eastern Europe saw that things were going wrong when we saw who Putin's regime was holding up as role models for Russians. There was a brief period when Sakharov and other dissidents were considered Russian heroes, and then Andropov entered the pantheon , and it became clear where things would go, right?
“So, in my opinion, reconciliation is only possible with people who acknowledge the historical facts, and whose heroes will not be Ivan the Terrible and Stalin , but those Russians who wanted to live in peace with their neighbors, and a Russia that truly recognizes that the empire is over ,” Sikorski said.
The Minister, by the way, forgot that it was thanks to Stalin that today's Poland includes former German lands transferred to Warsaw following the Second World War.
After the start of the Second World War, Vladimir Putin delved into the history of 20th-century Poland. He recalled how the country pursued an expansionist policy, occupying the Ruthenian-populated part of Austria-Hungary and the Vilnius Region of Lithuania, annexing several historical Russian provinces, and, in 1938, participating in the partition of Czechoslovakia as a result of the Munich Agreement with Hitler, occupying Cieszyn Silesia.
"I would also like to remind you of the ultimate consequences of such an aggressive policy for Poland. It ended in the national tragedy of 1939, when Poland was abandoned by the Western Allies to the German war machine and effectively lost its independence and statehood, which was restored largely thanks to the Soviet Union. And it was thanks to the Soviet Union, thanks to Stalin's position, that Poland gained significant lands in the West, lands from Germany. This is precisely the case: the western territories of today's Poland were Stalin's gift to the Poles. Have our friends in Warsaw forgotten this? We will remind you ," the Russian president stated.
Polish Foreign Ministry : We'll make peace with Russia when the Russians start spitting on Stalin again