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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...

The Soviet Union even went so far as to include the Katyn Massacre among the list of Nazi war crimes presented at the Nuremberg trials. Wikimedia CommonsOfficials examine the exhumed remains of the Katyn massacre. 1943. In 1940, Poland was caught between the military aggression of both Germany and the Soviet Union. The conflict climaxed that spring in Russia’s Katyn Forest when the Soviets murdered 22,000 of the best and brightest Poles of their generation en masse — then tried to blame the whole thing on the Nazis. The Katyn massacre and its ensuing cover-up shaped Russo-Polish relations for the...

Outgoing President admits he was not sober in Kharkov 22.12.2005 President Aleksander Kwasniewski has admitted that he was under the influence of alcohol during his visit to the Ukrainian city Kharkov in 1999. The president’s behaviour on a tour of the graves of Polish army officers murdered by the Soviet security police in 1940 prompted mass media comments that he was not sober. His aides blamed this on leg problems. Interviewed by the TVN24 news channel today, Kwasniewski said he had drank alcohol. He added that he was ill at that time and was taking medicines. He said that he...

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...

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...

President Kaczynski’s last speech 12.04.2010 11:53 Below is the text of the speech which Lech Kaczynski, who died on Saturday, was going to deliver at the 70th anniversary ceremony of the Katyn massacre. “Dear Representatives of the Katyn Families. Ladies and Gentlemen. In April 1940 over twenty-one thousand Polish prisoners from the NKVD camps and prisons were killed. The genocide was committed at Stalin’s will and at the Soviet Union’s highest authority’s command. The alliance between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact and the Soviet attack on Poland on 17 September 1939 reached a terrifying climax...

WARSAW — As the body of Poland’s president was returned to this traumatized capital on Sunday, a day after he and dozens of top Polish political and military leaders died in a plane crash in western Russia, the country was in mourning but there was already a sense that its young democracy had passed a major test. The mechanisms to replace the lost officials appeared to be functioning and the political culture was responding with remarkable unity. Senior Polish officials sought to reassure the public that the government would continue to function normally despite the loss. Military leaders were immediately...

Stalin's Killing Field One of the earliest--and certainly the most infamous--mass shootings of prisoners of war during World War II did not occur in the heat of battle but was a cold-blooded act of political murder. The victims were Polish officers, soldiers, and civilians captured by the Red Army after it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939. Strictly speaking, even the Polish servicemen were not POWs. The USSR had not declared war, and the Polish commander in chief had ordered his troops not to engage Soviet forces. But there was little the Poles could do. On 28 September, the USSR...

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