The Russian Foreign Ministry has said that a resolution passed in the lower house of the Polish parliament, which condemns the Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland in 1939, may set back relations between the two countries.
It was on September 17 1939 that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who only the month before had signed a non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler, sent troops in to Eastern Poland.
Before the Soviet invasion, on September 1, German troops had invaded the north, south and west of Poland, prompting Britain and France to declare war on Germany. And so began World War Two.
Despite the 70 years that have elapsed since the Soviet Union invaded Poland it is an act that still arouses much anger in the latter country and as
Ria Novosti reports that lingering anger resulted in politicians in the Sejm, the lower house of Poland's parliament, drawing up a document only last week condemning the actions of the Soviet Union leading up to the invasion, and after it took place.
On Wednesday the Sejm adopted the said document, which reads:
On September 17, 1939, the Soviet forces committed an act of aggression against Poland, violating its sovereignty and trampling on the statutes of international law. The grounds for the Red Army's invasion were given by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed on August 23, 1939 in Moscow between the Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany
The document adds that a "fourth partition" of Poland occurred as a result of the invasion and the country "fell victim to two totalitarian regimes - Nazism and communism".
Furthermore the document refers to genocide as having taken place, the massacre of thousands of Polish prisoners of war by the Soviet
NKVD at Katyn Forest in Western Russia in 1940 is considered an act that fits the description of genocide, says that history must not be falsified and "urges all people of good will in Russia to take joint efforts to expose and condemn Stalin-era crimes".
The Sejm resolution has led Russia's NATO envoy, Dmitry Rogozin, and the historian Alexander Dyukov to accuse politicians in Poland of "Russophobia", the former man also saying that Poland itself could well be deemed to have committed genocide when its forces ransacked Moscow during the 17th century.
And now, according to
Reuters, the Foreign Ministry in Russia has issued a statement in which it says the resolution adopted by the Sejm "seriously harms efforts to develop normal good-neighbourly relations between our two countries" and politicizes "a delicate issue, concerning the feelings of not just Poles and Russians, but Ukrainians and Belarusians as well". The Soviet Union claimed that the invasion of Eastern Poland was to protect Ukrainians and Belarusians, the areas invaded now form parts of the Ukraine and Belarus, whose security was threatened by the Polish government having fled the country after the Germans invaded.
Reuters notes that 27 million Soviet citizens died as their country fought to overcome Nazi Germany and the victory that was eventually achieved in 1945 remains a source of immense pride.
Poland also suffered terribly during World War Two with six million Poles, or one fifth of the country's population, losing their lives.
