{"id":6123,"date":"2015-02-04T08:36:12","date_gmt":"2015-02-04T15:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/?p=6123"},"modified":"2015-02-04T08:36:12","modified_gmt":"2015-02-04T15:36:12","slug":"celebrating-the-victory-over-nazi-germany-in-moscow-is-not-natural-because-its-the-place-where-world-war-ii-started-said-polish-foreign-minister-grzegorz-schetyna-london-o","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/?p=6123","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating the victory over Nazi Germany in Moscow is \u201cnot natural\u201d because it\u2019s the place where World War II started, said Polish Foreign Minister Grzegorz Schetyna. London or Berlin would be more suitable, he added."},"content":{"rendered":"

This article originally appeared<\/a> at RT<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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Schetyna\u2019s controversial comments came in an interview with RMF FM radio, as he was promoting Warsaw\u2019s planned celebration of the 70th anniversary Victory Day on May 8. The grand event will be held at Westerplatte Peninsula, the site near the city of Gdansk where the Nazi German invasion on September 1, 1939 started the bloodiest armed conflict in Europe in 20th century.<\/p>\n

Poland invited world leaders to participate in the event, potentially clashing with invitations from Moscow, where the end of World War II is celebrated a later, on May 9.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy have we got used so easily that Moscow is the place to honor the end of the hostilities rather than in London or Berlin,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0Schetyna\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0the radio on Monday.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not natural to celebrate the end of the war where it was started,\u201d\u00a0<\/em>he added in a reference to the signing of Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the German-Soviet non-aggression treaty that secretly split Eastern Europe into spheres of influence.<\/p>\n

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Any declaration of Moscow as the place where World War II started is bound to be seen as bending the historical truth in Russia.\u00a0The German-Soviet pact certainly brought open hostilities closer, but it was one link in a long chain of similar events, including some where Warsaw played a part as unfavorable as Moscow did, Russian historians say.<\/p>\n

For example, Poland annexed parts of Czechoslovakia when the country was partitioned by Nazi Germany in 1938, with European Great Powers Britain and France not opposing it because they had agreed to it by signing the Munich Agreement.<\/p>\n

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Polish Foreign Minister Grzegorz Schetyna<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Moscow blasted Schetyna\u2019s comments. The Polish FM is\u00a0\u201cagain walking the path of ideology war,\u201d<\/em>tweeted Aleksey Pushkov, the chair of Russian State Duma\u2019s Foreign Affairs Committee. Judging on where it is \u201cmore natural\u201d to celebrate the victory is \u201cnot up to him,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0the Russian official added.<\/p>\n

Schetyna is no stranger to controversial historical statements that are viewed as Russophobic by some commenters. In January, he claimed that the Nazi death camp Auschwitz was liberated \u201cby Ukrainians.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact it was a Red Army unit, which included Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Tatars and other ethnic groups that liberated the camp. Schetyna\u2019s words were labeled \u201csacrilegious\u201d by his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, at the time.<\/p>\n

According to the office of Russian President Vladimir Putin, 22 world leaders have already confirmed that they will participate in this year\u2019s V-Day celebrations in Moscow. European leaders have so far not replied to Russia\u2019s invitation.<\/p>\n

Sergey Ivanov, who heads Putin\u2019s presidential administration, said the celebration in Westerplatte was aimed at persuading\u00a0\u201cEuropean leaders \u2013 some of them \u2013 not to go to Moscow on May 9.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article originally appeared at RT   Schetyna\u2019s controversial comments came in an interview with RMF FM radio, as he was promoting Warsaw\u2019s planned celebration of the 70th anniversary Victory Day on May 8. The grand event will be held at Westerplatte Peninsula, the site near the city of Gdansk where the Nazi German invasion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6126,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[97,113],"tags":[1153,1154,562,1155,1152],"class_list":["post-6123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-democracy","category-germany","tag-1153","tag-grzegorz-schetyna","tag-moscow","tag-polen","tag-wwii-v-day-celebration"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/poland-wwii-celebration-moscow.si_.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2SfUR-1AL","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6123"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6127,"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6123\/revisions\/6127"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myfutureamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}