Poland has accused Vladimir Putin of manipulating history after he wrote an article claiming the pre-war Polish government threw “its own people under Hitler’s machine of destruction”. The article comes out just a week before Mr Putin is to host the annual Victory Day parade previously cancelled because of the coronavirus outbreak, and ahead of a nationwide vote that could allow him to stay in power until 2036. Mr Putin has used the Soviet Union’s decisive contribution to defeating Nazi Germany in 1945 as an argument to justify Russia’s special place in the world. Dwelling on the events of 1939 Mr Putin writes that Poland only has itself to blame for the Nazi invasion of September. “The blame for the tragedy that Poland then suffered lies entirely with the Polish leadership, which had impeded the formation of a military alliance between Britain, France and the Soviet Union and relied on the help from its Western partners, throwing its own people under the steamroller of Hitler's machine of destruction,” he states. Later, he says Red Army units were sent into “the so-called Eastern Borderlines” instead of writing that the Soviet Union invaded Poland under the terms of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Poland reacted furiously. Stanislaw Zaryn, director of the National Security Department of the Polish prime minister’s office, said: “It is not the first time the Russian president has manipulated history with the goal to present a false picture of WWII. "Russia’s continued ‘memory war’ aims to whitewash the disgraceful Soviet past, erase from collective memory the fact that during the war Stalin and Hitler colluded with each other, and underpin the myth of the Soviet Union as a sole conqueror of Nazi Germany.” While Russian authorities in the 1990s publicly condemned and apologised for multiple crimes committed by the Soviet regime, the Kremlin in recent years has sought to defend its wartime record, arguing among other things that a 1939 non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany, carving up Europe into spheres of influence, was a necessary evil.
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