According to the wpolityce.pl news website, Yevgeny Satanovsky, a prominent Russian political scientist who served as head of the Russian Jewish Congress from 2001 to 2004, has stated on Russian public television that erstwhile Soviet leader Josef Stalin was "right" to order the shooting of thousands of Polish prisoners of war in the Katyn Forest in the early days of World War II.
Following the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, thousands of Polish officers were deported to camps in the Soviet Union.
Some 22,000 Polish prisoners of war and intellectuals were killed in the spring of 1940 on orders from top Soviet authorities in what is known as the Katyn Massacre.
'Russian propaganda campaign against Poland'
The wpolityce.pl website said Satanovsky’s shocking remarks appeared to be the latest salvo in a war of words over World War II history between Warsaw and Moscow and part of an intensifying “Russian propaganda campaign against Poland.”
The Polish foreign ministry in late December summoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Andreyev over a string of claims by President Vladimir Putin about Poland’s role in World War II.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said last month that Russia’s Putin “has lied about Poland on numerous occasions, and he has always done it deliberately.”
Morawiecki said in an opinion piece published this week that “renewed attempts to paint Poland as a perpetrator, rather than a victim” of World War II “can’t be tolerated.”
Polish President Andrzej Duda has accused Putin of “post-Stalinist revisionism” and of trying to shift the blame for the outbreak of World War II onto Poland.
The latest remarks by Russia's Satanovsky, who heads the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies in Moscow, come as the world prepares to commemorate 75 years since the liberation of the Nazi German death camp of Auschwitz, wpolityce.pl said.
(gs)
Source: wpolityce.pl