FM says Russian authorities desecrated Polish war memorial
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said on Wednesday that a monument to murdered Polish prisoners of war in Mednoye, Russia, had been desecrated.
FM says Russian authorities desecrated Polish war memorial
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said on Wednesday that a monument to murdered Polish prisoners of war in Mednoye, Russia, had been desecrated.
"This constitutes unacceptable interference by Russia in historical truth," Sikorski said in a video posted on X. "We will defend the crosses removed from the memorial headstones."
The monument stands at the Polish War Cemetery in Mednoye, which commemorates victims of the Katyn massacre, where thousands of Polish officers and officials executed by the Soviet secret police (NKVD) in 1940.
According to Sikorski, the Virtuti Militari cross and the Defensive War of 1939 Cross were removed from the headstone.
"This was not the act of vandals," he added. "It was carried out by cemetery authorities on the orders of the local prosecutor's office and therefore on the orders of the Russian state."
The Katyn massacre was a mass execution of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers, police, and members of the intelligentsia carried out by NKVD in the spring of 1940. The victims, taken prisoner after the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in 1939, were murdered in several locations, including the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, as well as Mednoye and Kharkiv.
For decades, the Soviet Union denied responsibility, falsely blaming Nazi Germany, until officially admitting its role in 1990. The massacre remains one of the most painful episodes in Polish-Russian relations. (PAP)
mj/ jch / mar/
