Poland rebuffs Putin’s historical untruths from interview

By Jo Harper

WARSAW (AA) - Poland on Tuesday rebuffed what it says are “Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 10 lies on Poland and Ukraine” from an interview last week by a former Fox News host.

Tucker Carlson, a longtime Putin admirer while at Fox News, appears to be part of a rhetorical shift in US right-wing circles to pivot away from support for Ukraine.

On Saturday, former President and likely presidential candidate Donald Trump suggested NATO would not support members that don’t pay what he called “their fair share” to the alliance – at least 2% of their GDP – and would instead “encourage” Putin to attack them. Polish leaders have been swift to reinforce the unity of the European elements of the alliance, with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk visiting French President Emmanuel Macron this week to discuss a bolstering of European defenses. Tusk also said last week US Republican senators should be ashamed of their moves to block increased military aid to Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin has fought a hybrid informational war that predates its February 2022 attack on Ukraine. This includes attempts to reignite historical grievances between Poland and Ukraine, and other sensitive ethnic and national border issues dating back into the first half of the 20th century.

In the interview last Thursday with Carlson posted on X, Putin said that Poland had collaborated with Hitler’s Germany – echoing his accusation that Ukraine is a “Nazi” country.

In response, the Polish Foreign Ministry said: “Before WWII, Polish diplomacy tried to keep good neighborly relations with Germany. Poland entering into any sort of military alliance with Hitler was out of the question. In the period between WWI and WWII, Poland found itself between two aggressive neighbors: Germany and Russia, neither of which recognized the Polish nation’s right to have an independent state. In 1934, in Berlin, the German-Polish declaration of non-aggression was signed, which was intended to guarantee the settling of disputes by peaceful means. Even before that, in 1932, a similar non-aggression pact was signed with the USSR.”

- Putin accuses Poland of starting World War II

A second correction aimed Putin’s claim that Poles had in effect forced Hitler to attack them. “Why did Poland start the war on Sept. 1, 1939?” Putin asked rhetorically. “It was unwilling to cooperate. Hitler could do nothing but start implementing his plans in relation to Poland.”

The ministry notes that Poland “rejected Hitler’s claims as well as his proposal to enter into a Polish-German alliance against the USSR. It was Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet authorities that signed an agreement against Poland on Aug. 23, 1939 (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), which allowed Germany to attack Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. Soviet Russia and Hitler’s Germany cooperated in concert until June 1941.”

Putin also suggested that during World War II, “Russia, which was then named the USSR, regained its historical lands.”

The Polish ministry said: “The USSR seized the eastern territories of Poland as a result of armed aggression (Sept. 17, 1939) at a time when Poland was fighting the German invasion. It was a stab in the back inflicted on the Polish state. The Soviets rigged the so-called people's referenda in the Polish borderlands and conducted them in an atmosphere of terror. Lviv and the then-provinces of Lviv and Stanislawow (today’s Western Ukraine) have never been a part of the Russian Empire. The Vilnius region was also not historically part of Russia.”

Putin went on to claim that Ukraine is “in fact an artificial state created by Lenin and Stalin and that the left bank of the Dnieper, including Kyiv, is historically Russian land. The idea of Ukrainians as a separate nation emerged in Poland.”

This claim fits into a wider and oft-repeated false Russian claim that Ukraine is not a formally sovereign state.

The Polish ministry said today’s Ukraine “emerged as a state thanks to the Ukrainian national movement. The Bolsheviks did not establish it but merely conquered a part of it to set up one of the Soviet republics. Kyiv was the historical capital of Ruthenia, and Moscow did not exist at the time. In 1991, Ukraine became an independent state with internationally recognized borders. Nobody ‘invented’ the Ukrainian nation.

Putin also claimed there were two coups in Ukraine to “artificially break its ties with Russia.”

The ministry wrote: “During the (2005) Orange Revolution, the Ukrainian people refused to accept electoral fraud. The organization of another round of voting allowed the election of President Viktor Yushchenko, who actually won a majority of the votes. After the Revolution of Dignity, President Petro Poroshenko won democratically in the presidential election.”

Putin’s final disputed claim was that in 2014, in illegally taking over Crimea, Moscow was forced to defend the Ukrainian peninsula because it was in jeopardy.

The ministry replied: “There was no threat to Crimea in 2014. The Revolution of Dignity led to a peaceful change of power through democratic elections. Russia’s ‘little green men’ appeared in Crimea to destabilize the situation in Ukraine.”