2023-07-22 11:41 update: 2023-07-26, 11:21
Photo: PAP/Radek Pietruszka
The Russian ambassador has been summoned to the Polish Foreign Ministry after the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, accused Poland of territorial ambitions in Ukraine.
"The Ambassador of the Russian Federation Sergei Andreyev appeared at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the meeting began at 10 am and was very brief," deputy foreign minister Pawel Jablonski told PAP on Saturday.
On Friday, Putin told a meeting of his Security Council in televised remarks that "Poland's leaders likely seek to set up a coalition under the Nato umbrella and directly join the conflict in Ukraine, and then 'tear off' a wider piece for themselves, restore their, as they believe, historical territory - today's western Ukraine."
He also said that "it was thanks to the Soviet Union, thanks to (Joseph) Stalin's position that Poland received significant territories in the West, the German lands."
"It's just like this: the western territory of today's Poland is Stalin's gift to the Poles. Have our friends in Warsaw forgotten about it? We will remind them," Putin added.
Later on Friday, Poland's prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, reacted to Putin's words.
"Stalin was a war criminal, guilty of the death of hundreds of thousands of Poles. Historical truth is not debatable," he wrote on Twitter.
"The ambassador of the Russian Federation will be summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs," Morawiecki added.
Poland's deputy foreign minister, Pawel Jablonski, has also condemned the Russian president's recent statements.
Talking to the Polsat News broadcaster on Friday, he said that "we have another confirmation of who Putin is and what Russia is today" and that Russia has hostile intentions not only towards Ukraine but towards the whole of Europe.
"Putin dreams of returning to Stalin's times. Talking about the alleged gifts that we were supposed to receive from Stalin, he is of course cynically lying, because we lost a much larger part of our territory, we were conquered by the Soviets, we were occupied by them for almost five decades," Jablonski argued.
"We need to remind ourselves of this all the time, because falsifying history is also Putin's weapon used by him in a hybrid war," he added. (PAP)
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