Putin's false interpretation of the story about “one people” is doomed to failure - Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland

This opinion was expressed to Polish Radio by Deputy Foreign Minister of Poland Marcin Przydacz, commenting on the historic signing by the foreign ministers of Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania of the Declaration in Vilnius, which directly appeals to the common historical past of the three states, as well as the signing of the road map of the Lublin triangle. This is reported by Censor.net.

The representative of the Polish Foreign Ministry stressed that the so-called “memory dispute” between the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other, has not disappeared anywhere.

“An example of this was the immediate reaction of Vladimir Putin, who in his article immediately after our Declaration sought to show that Ukrainians are really Russians or Little Russians, as today's ideologues of Moscow want to present it. Therefore, the dispute will continue, but it seems to me that history cannot be completely distorted, it cannot be changed by any attempts of false interpretation that Moscow is trying to make. They are doomed to defeat because they do not rely on the truth,” said Marcin Przydacz.

The Polish Deputy Foreign Minister recalled that over the past 200 years, these countries and peoples have been under Russian occupation. In addition, official Moscow, during the Soviet Union, also “tried to show the separation of the peoples of Eastern Europe from the culture of Western Europe and establish the predominance of Russian culture.”

At the same time, Przydac recalled how Lithuania in the 90s and Ukraine “during previous governments tried to base their policies on a separate national identity.”

“I think that now they are already at a slightly different stage; having strengthened their belief in separateness, they can afford to turn to the history that unites us without resentment, sometimes anti-Polish, which existed in Lithuania somewhere in the 90s, and in Ukraine in the 2000s,” he said.

The politician is convinced that today Ukraine and Lithuania realize and begin to discover the huge potential that is contained in the common history of all three states. This history, according to Przydacz, has many examples of tolerance, cooperation, and democracy, and today Kyiv, Vilnius and Warsaw have a unique opportunity to build a common successful future.

As Risu previously reported, the Kremlin also actively involved the Russian Orthodox Church in the propaganda of "one people".

"Ukrainians-Little Russians and Russians – are one people that Russia is ready to protect by all possible means.” This is stated in the article of the first deputy chairman of the Synodal Department for Church-society relations and mass media of the Russian Orthodox church Alexander Shchipkov, which is published on the website of Nezavisimaya Gazeta.

The representative of the Russian Orthodox Church claims that “Ukraine is an empire.” "Both the Hungarian, Romanian, and Russian populations are by no means enthusiastic about the imperial policy of Ukraine, which decided to keep itself within the Soviet borders, but at the same time give power to the western Ukrainian ethnocracy, which does not represent the national majority. To put the former Ukrainian SSR in the Procrustean bed of a narrow mono–national doctrine – “one country, one language, one nation”, it is necessary to carry out cultural and religious purges, and sometimes direct military genocide,” Shchipkov says.

“Today, the Russian president speaks on behalf of the RoS, novorossians, and Little Russians. He recalls that Russia cannot afford to leave a part of its people without protection. This is a matter of historical national viability. By what means the national rights of the United Russian people will be protected, it is impossible to say in advance. But the moment of a fundamental solution to the problem of Ukrainian Russians (Russians with citizenship of the state of Ukraine) is clearly already close,” the official of the Russian Orthodox Church says.

This is not the first reaction of the Russian Orthodox Church in the person of Shchipkov to Putin's article. As Risu informed, this figure of the Russian Orthodox Church recently commented on the same article by Putin "on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians", but then spoke about the church schism in Ukraine, with which Russia "will never agree".