The Polish president has sought an official pretext for the move, says Sergey Naryshkin
FILE PHOTO. Aerial view of the city of Lvov, Ukraine © Getty Images / venuestock
Warsaw is preparing to make an official claim on parts of Western Ukraine and President Andrzej Duda has already instructed the “relevant services” to come up with a justifiable basis for the move, according to the director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergey Naryshkin.
In an interview with RIA Novosti published on Wednesday, the spy chief claimed Russia had received intel suggesting that Warsaw plans to submit weighty restitution demands to Kiev for the 1943 Volhynia massacres.
The brutal attacks saw some 100,000 Poles murdered by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UIA).
According to Naryshkin, Warsaw plans present the claim as an “initiative from below” by seeking out descendants of the people who suffered at the hands of Ukrainian nationalists living in Poland. The country’s leadership has also allegedly instructed Polish media outlets to “warm the public up” to the idea that here’s a need to “collect Polish lands,” the intelligence chief added.
“The Ukrainian leadership intends to act proactively and persistently out of fear that senior NATO partners will try to negotiate with Moscow in the coming winter months, ignoring the interests of not only the Ukrainians, but the Poles as well,” Naryshkin suggested. He noted that Warsaw believes it is due “generous compensation” for providing military assistance to Kiev in its ongoing conflict with Moscow.
Furthermore, Naryshkin claims that Warsaw plans to draw on the “successful Russian experience of returning ancestral territories by holding referendums” to annex parts of Western Ukraine, primarily the regions of Lviv, Ivano-Frankovsk, and Ternopol.
The Russian spy chief urged the Polish officials to carefully examine the country’s history of violent clashes with Ukrainian nationalists and avoid “stepping on the same rake again.”
Last month, the Polish Foreign Ministry released a list of reparations the nation is seeking from Berlin for the tangible and intangible losses it suffered at the hands of Nazi Germany during World War II. In its claim, Warsaw demanded a staggering €1.32 trillion as well as the return of cultural items and assets of Polish state banks confiscated by the Third Reich.
Germany has denied owing Poland any reparations and claimed that its financial commitments related to World War II had been settled with the reunification of the country under the 1990 Two Plus Four Treaty.
