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MFA statement on devastation of Polish monument at War Cemetery in Miednoje

Ministry of Foreign Affairs - Republic of Poland

21.05.2025

It has been with concern that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has received information from the Polish Embassy in Moscow about the devastation of a Polish monument at the War Cemetery in Miednoje. We strongly demand that the Russian side restore the cemetery to its original condition immediately.

Low-relief representations of the War Order of Virtuti Militari and the Cross of the 1939 September Campaign have been hacked off a cemetery monument. The Polish embassy received information about the current condition of the site from members of the local Catholic clergy and the Polish diaspora.

It must be stressed that the monument was not vandalised. It was altered by the decision of the Putin-controlled Office of Public Prosecutor for Tver Oblast. According to that authority, the said symbols are against Russia's federal law on commemorating the victory of the Soviet nation in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. The prosecutor's office purports that the war began in 1941.

It must be remembered that the Miednoje cemetery is a burial site for victims of the 1940 Katyn Massacre, a mass execution of 6300 Polish officers, members of the State Police, and officials from the Ostashkov camp shot in the back of the head by the NKVD. For years, the Soviet Union authorities wanted to hide this crime and falsify the truth.

We regard this outrageous provocation not only as an attempt to interfere in Poland's presidential election, but as a typical Russian ploy to change history: to distort the historical fact that it was Stalin's Russia, together with Hitler, that invaded Poland on 17 September 1939.

It is all the more outrageous that at the same time Putin's Russia is restoring the cult of a man who authorised the murder—Joseph Stalin. A cult whose victims were not only Polish prisoners of war, but above all the Russians and other nations of the USSR.

We demand that the Russians immediately restore the cemetery to its original condition. We demand that the Institute of National Remembrance respond and act on this matter.

We would like to recall that numerous Russian cemeteries throughout Poland feature Russian symbols and decorations of the Great Patriotic War.

The current Russian authorities once again prove that they have no respect not only for history, but also for the dead.