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A top ally of President Vladimir Putin warned Poland on Thursday that the NATO member state was now considered a "dangerous enemy" by Russia and could end up losing its statehood if it continued on its current course. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, made the comments in an 8,000-word article on Russian-Polish relations, saying Moscow now had a "dangerous enemy" in Poland. "We will treat it (Poland) precisely as a historical enemy," Medvedev said. "If there is no hope for reconciliation with the enemy, Russia should have only one and a very tough...

Activists from the western Russian city of Smolensk have petitioned the country's parliament, the Duma, to demolish a symbolic memorial site to the Katyn massacre and a cemetery for its victims, Russian daily Kommersant has reported. Images posted online showed heavy machinery, bearing the pro-war 'Z' and 'V' symbols, approaching the Katyn monument in an apparent bid to destroy it. The memorial site and monument commemorate the Katyn Forest Massacre in western Russia, a series of mass executions of Polish POWs, mainly military officers and policemen, carried out by the Soviet NKVD security agency in April and May 1940. The...

Russia’s defense ministry accuses Armia Krayova of ‘destroying Jews’ in Warsaw, amid feud with Poland over war’s historyRussia’s defense ministry on Friday accused the Polish resistance movement that staged the Warsaw uprising of 1944 of “destroying Jews,” in the latest salvo of Moscow’s feud with Poland over WWII history. The accusations were posted with a trove of declassified documents called “Warsaw Under Fire” on the 75th anniversary of Soviet forces’ taking the city after more than five years of occupation by Nazi Germany. The Russian defense ministry published a multimedia website Friday to mark the anniversary with scans of documents...

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Senate has adopted a resolution recognizing that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin committed genocide against the Ukrainian people in the early 1930s, when millions died in a horrific famine known as the Holodomor. The office of Republican Senator Rob Portman, who sponsored the bill, did not immediately get back to RFE/RL for comment. Asked for comment, the State Department referred to a 2017 statement that described the Holodomor as "one of the most atrocious acts of the 20th century. The "simple resolution" passed on October 3 commemorates the 85th anniversary of the famine of 1932-33. The Senate...

In wooded northern Russia, near the Finnish border, archaeological digs by a patriotic historical group are unearthing controversy. The Russian Military History Society, which was created by the Kremlin, says it is seeking the remains of Soviet soldiers who died when the region was occupied by Nazi-aligned Finns during World War II. But human rights activists allege the organisation is trying to cover up Stalin-era repressions in the Sandarmokh forest, in Karelia. “The search for the remains of soldiers from the Second World War on the site of mass executions by the NKVD...looks like an attempt to manipulate memory," Memorial...

A British air accident investigator has told Sky News he believes there were explosions on board a plane before it crashed eight years ago, killing Polish President Lech Kaczynski. Frank Taylor's findings challenge the original reports of authorities The wreckage after the crash in April 2010

The Red Army's defeat of Nazi German forces on Polish soil in 1944-1945 remains a thorny issue in Russian-Polish relations. Many Poles viewed the Red Army as an occupation force, not as liberators, as the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact had carved up Poland between two dictatorships. Poland updated its "de-communisation" legislation, banning "totalitarian" symbols, which would include Soviet propaganda monuments. The Russian foreign ministry condemned the new Polish "de-communisation" law as "an outrageous provocation", and warned of unspecified "consequences". "The USSR paid the highest price to liberate Poland - on that country's soil, in battles with the enemy, more than 600,000...

KHATYN, Belarus (JTA) — Even by Soviet standards, the massive memorial complex near Minsk to the victims of Nazi atrocities stands out for its immense scale and ambition. Spread across half a million square feet — roughly the size of 10 football fields — the haunting Khatyn Memorial is essentially a graveyard not for people, but for entire villages wiped out by the Nazis in Belarus. Byelorussia, as it was then known, was one of the few places in Europe where German brutality toward non-Jews matched their anti-Semitic savagery. The memorial features soil from each of the 186 villages razed...

The Lower Merion resident gave President Roosevelt some unpleasant news on the Soviet massacre.Gov. George H. Earle (wearing the spotlight cap) with striking coal miners in 1937 Most people who work for the president of the United States know not to bring him news he doesn’t want to hear. But some just can’t help themselves—and so they suffer the consequences. Take George H. Earle III of Lower Merion, who, in 1944, passed on to Franklin Roosevelt some unpleasant facts about the Soviet Union’s massacre of an estimated 22,000 Polish army officers in 1940. The Soviets had blamed the atrocity...

The power of history to speak to us depends on our ability to hear it. When we are deaf to its secrets, or too confused or conditioned to decipher them, we miss the opportunity to be empowered by them. We thus fail to overcome the propaganda our own government, like the dictatorships we revile, has all too often deceived us with. I am struck by this aura of static around a sensational new discovery. Researcher and author Krystyna Piorkowska, the Associated Press reported this week, has unearthed a “lost” U.S. document, dating back to 1945, known as the Van Vliet...

American POWS sent secret coded messages to Washington with news of a Soviet atrocity: In 1943 they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area. The testimony about the infamous massacre of Polish officers might have lessened the tragic fate that befell Poland under the Soviets, some scholars believe. Instead, it mysteriously vanished into the heart of American power. The long-held suspicion is that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't want to...

The American POWs sent secret coded messages to Washington with news of a Soviet atrocity: In 1943 they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area.

The American communists joined in the Soviet propaganda campaign. Corliss Lamont, a millionaire communist propagandist, wrote “Soviet Russia’s severance of relations with the Polish Government-in-Exile, over the Nazi-inspired charge that the Russians murdered 10,000 Polish army officers, shows clearly the danger to the United Nations of the splitting tactics engineered by Hitler and definitely helped along by the general campaign of anti-Soviet propaganda carried on during recent months in Britain and America. According to the London Bureau of the New York Herald Tribune, ‘It is a safe assumption that the Poles would not have taken so tough an attitude toward...

The European Court of Human Rights said on Monday it could not consider complaints over Russia's investigation into the 1940 Katyn massacre. In a majority ruling, the judges said the killing took place before Russia ratified the European Convention on Human Rights, which allows citizens to appeal to the Strasbourg Court. The case was brought by 15 Polish nationals who are relatives of 12 victims of the massacre, in which more than 20,000 members of the Polish elite were killed by Soviet secret police.

Court Rules Against Russia in Katyn Massacre Case WRITTEN BY JAMES HEISER WEDNESDAY, 18 APRIL 2012 16:38 Over 70 years after Soviet forces secretly murdered approximately 22,000 Polish intellectuals and military officers in the Katyn Forest, the European Court of Human Rights has declared that atrocity to have been a “war crime.” However, unlike other “war crimes” of the Second World War, the calculated butchering of tens of thousands of Poles will have very little impact on a government that went to great lengths to avoid aiding the investigation: the Russian government will be required to pay 5,000 euros (approximately...

At the end of November something historically quite significant happened in Russia. The State Duma passed a statement conceding Soviet responsibility for the Katyn Woods massacre, one of the 20th century’s worst war crimes. The roots of this atrocity date to September 1939, when the Nazis and Bolsheviks jointly invaded, annihilated, and partitioned Poland. The Soviets seized thousands of Polish military officers as prisoners. Their fate was sealed on March 5, 1940 when Stalin signed their death warrant, condemning 21,857 of them to “the supreme penalty: shooting.” This we now know conclusively through the surviving NVKD document. The officers were...

When listening to the radio couple of days ago I came across this ballad about Katyn massacre, performed by a Polish singer Lech Makowiecki. I found it absolutely beautiful and so much adequate to the topic. When listening to it I could hardly refrain myself fom crying (such a shame, I'm a grownn up man ;-) The song is in Polish, but here you have the lyrics in English. " Katyn 1940. The last letter I'm jotting a few words for You today, Although, I know, You won't receive them again, I'm writing from here to You for the last...

Then it all ended unexpectedly, as if on cue. Putin traveled last week to Katyn along with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. What caused such a dramatic shift? The Wall Street Journal on April 8 reveals the answer. According to the article, “U.S. [energy] giants will start drilling for shale gas in Poland within the next few weeks.” There’s your answer. All of Russia’s neo-imperialism has been built upon the fact that it has “peaceful gas” (similar to the Soviet Union’s “peaceful atom”) and that it can shove its gas pipelines through Poland just like the Kremlin did with Ukraine....

Today, the facts about Katyn are not in doubt. In the spring of 1940, 22,000 Polish prisoners of war—most of them army officers, but also thousands of leading members of the Polish intelligentsia—were systematically murdered by the Soviet secret police on direct orders from Joseph Stalin. ...In one of history's richer ironies, the massacre was first discovered and publicized by the Nazis in 1943. That made it that much easier for the Soviets to dismiss the revelation as German propaganda to cover up a German crime, a line the U.S. and Britain were only too happy to adopt to propitiate...

An ally who feared U.S. indifference. Tragedy In Smolensk: Lech Kaczynski was a Polish patriot and a friend of the West who believed in the defense of freedom and democracy. We don't have many friends like him, and we treated him shabbily. Numerologists might note the number 70 figured prominently in both the life and death of Poland's president. Kaczynski, 60, his wife Maria, an economist, and 95 others who died Saturday on their way to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the massacre of 22,000 Polish prisoners in the Katyn Forest in western Russia in 1940 by Stalin's secret...