Interfax: World Russian People’s Congress calls on Poles to stop hating Russians

Polish and Russian Flags

MOSCOW. Nov 14 (Interfax) – The World Russian People’s Congress believes the recent incident near the Russian Embassy in Warsaw is a result of Russophobia, which is cultivated in some groups of Polish society.

“The main reason for these outrageous actions is the constant fuelling of hate for Russia and the Russian people in some parts of Polish society,” the discussion club of the World Russian People’s Congress said in a statement received by Interfax on Thursday.

The statement alleges that most Polish history books and publications promote the image of Poland as a victim that was “constantly persecuted and oppressed by its cruel Eastern neighbor.”

“The fact that Rzeczpospolita ‘from sea to sea’ was formed largely by the territory of Orthodox Rus and that Russian troops never entered originally Polish land before the 18th century, and that Polish troops reached as far as Moscow is no longer present in the mass consciousness of Polish society,” the statement says.

Polish society has still not realized that the Russian movement westward in the 18th century was “only a counterattack, a re-conquest of the ancient Russian lands with Orthodox population” and the divisions of Rzeczpospolita by Russia only affected that part of the Polish state, the World Russian People’s Congress said in its statement.

The statement says that while modern Russian society “reflects on the crimes committed by our government in the years before and after the war (which, in particular, the Katyn tragedy),” Polish society “has removed from the memories of the crimes of that era from its collective consciousness.”

“They never repented the mass killing of imprisoned Red Army soldiers in 1920, the total demolition of Orthodox churches (including the magnificent Cathedral of Alexander Nevsky in Warsaw), the destruction of the culture of the people of Belarus and Ukraine on ‘Kresy Wschodnie’, or the cruel actions by guerillas from Armia Krajowa against Soviet civilians during the Hitler occupation,” the statement says.

On Monday, participants in a Polish nationalist march devoted to the Polish Independence Day threw bottles, flares, and garbage onto the territory of the Russian Embassy in Warsaw. It was later reported that the attackers had burned a security booth near the embassy fence. The Polish ambassador was summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry over the incident and the ministry demanded that the Polish authorities apologize and take measures to protect the Russian Embassy. On Wednesday, Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski apologized to Russia for the “absolutely scandalous events near the Russian Embassy” in an interview with Polish Radio Zet.

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