By Olha Hembik | 2025-06-02

WARSAW -- In a quiet cemetery in Russia's Tver province, something is missing. Where once bronze bas-reliefs of Polish military decorations stood -- the Order of Virtuti Militari and the September 1939 Campaign Cross -- now there is only polished stone, scrubbed clean of memory.

The Polish War Cemetery in the village of Mednoye holds the graves of up to 6,500 Polish prisoners of war, victims of the Katyn massacre carried out under Joseph Stalin's orders. Now, the site has become the latest flashpoint in a broader struggle over the history of World War II.

Workers carried out the dismantling at the request of the Tver provincial prosecutor general's office to "correct a violation of federal laws," the website of the Mednoye Memorial Complex said in May.

But Warsaw sees it differently. Polish officials have condemned the move as "unacceptable interference in the memory of Polish victims," RMF 24 reported.

Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski demanded restoration of the cemetery to its original state.

"We will defend these crosses because we disagree with Russia's historical lie,” Sikorski said in Brussels in May, referring to the actual beginning of World War II: September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. Soviet troops invaded from the east on September 17.

Today, Russia insists that World War II began only in 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. That claim brushes aside the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact and the two dictatorships' joint attack on Poland.

The Foreign Ministry delivered a diplomatic note to Moscow protesting the removal, Sikorski said on Polish radio station RMF FM in May.

A crime with characteristics of genocide

Russia's recent actions come as no surprise to Poland, which views them as retaliation for the closure of the Russian consulate in Krakow, Robert Czyżewski, a Polish analyst and former director of the Polish Institute in Kyiv, said.

Poland had accused Russia of using the consulate to orchestrate subversive activities.

"We understand who [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is and what Russia is. In the past [the Russians] killed [Poles], but now this is their means [of anti-Polish activity]. There is outrage but not surprise," Czyżewski told Kontur, referring to arson that Poland blames on Russia.

He outlined the Katyn massacre, in which Soviet secret police executed Polish prisoners of war. The killings took place in 1940 at several sites in Poland and Ukraine.

Of the approximately 22,000 victims, about 6,500 are buried in Mednoye, he said.

Nazi troops found the mass graves of other slain Poles near Katyn in 1943, he said.

"The Soviet Union denied everything from the very beginning," he added.

Meaningful dialogue on the Katyn massacre, recognized by Poland as a "war crime with characteristics of genocide," became possible only under Boris Yeltsin, Russia's president from 1991 to 1999, Andrzej Bęben, a Polish historian, told Kontur.

Officials inaugurated a memorial complex in Mednoye in 2000, but as Bęben put it, "things started to go backward" two decades later as Russia began rewriting history.

Rewriting history

"In 2020, at various pseudohistorical conferences, [Russian historians] again claimed the Germans killed the Poles, citing fabricated testimonies and denying the NKVD's role," Bęben said, referring to the Stalin-era secret police.

Russia now calls the Katyn massacre "Hitler's provocation against the Soviet Union."

After Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, workers removed Polish flags from the Mednoye memorial, and the Kremlin labeled Poland, a staunch supporter of Ukraine, an "unfriendly" state, Bęben noted.

He criticized a temporary exhibition at Mednoye organized two years ago.

"They installed the entire pantheon of Soviet executioners at the burial site: Stalin, Lenin, [KGB founder Feliks] Dzerzhinsky. Are they heroes again? It's no surprise it came to the removal of the crosses," Bęben said.

Poland understands that Russia wants to rewrite history, and "no one has any illusions," Czyżewski stressed.

Poland will not respond with barbarity

Russia accuses Poland of waging a "battle over Soviet monuments," claiming that fewer than 100 of more than 500 Soviet memorials in Poland remain.

Sikorski debunked the claim.

"In Poland we tolerate symbols of the Soviet state in cemeteries; we tolerate red stars," he said in May in Brussels.

"In Poland, our approach to monuments is different from our approach to graves. Soviet monuments should be removed, but no one touches the graves," Czyżewski said.

"However, this too was Soviet policy -- to leave soldiers' bodies in foreign soil, not bring them home to families, denying relatives a grave to visit and pray at," Czyżewski said.

"It's an indicator that it's 'where they [the fallen Soviet soldiers] belong,'" Czyżewski said. "For the Russians, a grave is like a symbol of annexing territory to the empire."

Poland will not respond to Russian provocations by desecrating Soviet graves, he added.

"Perhaps Putin expects Poland to respond in kind. If so, he's mistaken," Bęben added.

Ukrainians, unlike the Russians, still respect the graves of slaughtered Poles.

Under Russian shelling, residents of Kharkiv, Ukraine, are still maintaining their area's graves of Katyn massacre victims, Polish war correspondent and founder of the Fundacja Przyszłość dla Ukrainy UA Future Piotr Kaszuwara, who visited those graves earlier this year, noted.

"The Katyn massacre was covered up. What's happening in eastern Ukraine, the destruction of entire cities, hundreds of thousands of people killed and maimed -- you can see all of that on the front pages," Kaszuwara told Kontur.

"Moscow continues to commit bloody, brutal crimes ... now in full view of the world," he said.