Poland’s president has accused Russia’s Vladimir Putin of spreading a “historical lie” about his country in the run-up to events marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
Andrzej Duda’s salvo, in an interview with the Financial Times, follows claims about Poland’s past by the Russian president, including the accusation that Poland, which was invaded by Germany and then by the USSR in September 1939, was partly to blame for the outbreak of the second world war.
Mr Putin also last month branded the Polish ambassador to Nazi Germany an “anti-Semitic pig”. “The words of Vladimir Putin are a complete distortion of historical truth. We give it a very direct name, it is an ideology, it is a kind of post-Stalinist revisionism,” Mr Duda said in the presidential palace in Warsaw. “Some claim that this is propaganda-based hybrid warfare . . .
Some experts claim that Putin’s words are used for the purpose of internal propaganda. For us, it doesn’t make a difference. For us, what matters is that this historical lie is being spread around the world. And we can absolutely not accept this.” As well as further fraying Russia and Poland’s tense relationship, the spat has cast a shadow over this week’s commemorations of the liberation of Auschwitz, the concentration camp in occupied Poland that Nazi Germany built, ran, and used to exterminate 1.1m people, including almost 1m Jews, during the Holocaust.
Mr Duda will take part in a commemoration at Auschwitz on January 27, and had also been invited to attend a ceremony in Jerusalem to mark the anniversary in the Holocaust memorial centre Yad Vashem in Jerusalem on January 23, which is set to be attended by dozens of heads of state.
But he decided not to attend the event in Israel after being told that he would not be able to give a speech, whereas Mr Putin — and also other leaders including the presidents of Germany and France — would be able to speak.
