The Polish Foreign Ministry will review Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent comments about the country's policies in the 1930s and the role of then-ambassador to Nazi Germany Jozef Lipski in them after the Christmas holidays, a spokesperson for the ministry told Sputnik on Wednesday
WARSAW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 25th December, 2019) The Polish Foreign Ministry will review Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent comments about the country's policies in the 1930s and the role of then-ambassador to Nazi Germany Jozef Lipski in them after the Christmas holidays, a spokesperson for the ministry told Sputnik on Wednesday.Poland is celebrating Catholic Christmas until Thursday.
Speaking at the annual extended meeting of the Russian Defense Ministry's board on Tuesday, Putin called Lipski a "bastard and anti-Semitic swine," who supported Hitler and his idea of expelling Polish Jews to Africa "for extinction and extermination." The president then read excerpts from a report the Polish ambassador had compiled for the foreign ministry at the time, in which the former suggested building a monument to Hitler if the Nazis' deportation plans were carried out.
Later that day, the speaker of the lower house of Russian parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin, said that Poland should apologize for such statements made by former officials.
"You must understand that there is now a holiday in our country that is sacred for most Poles. The situation and the remarks by President Putin and other Russian officials will probably be analyzed after the weekend," the spokesperson told Sputnik, adding that a diplomatic response, if necessary, would come no earlier than Friday.
Putin's remarks came in the wake of a European Parliament resolution on the remembrance and history of World War II that claimed that the 1939 non-aggression treaty signed by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, had caused the World War. In fact, Polish Ambassador Lipski met with German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop on October 24, 1938, a year before the war began, and with Hitler a few days later to discuss Germany's plan to expel Jews to Africa.
