Four years ago, in August 2012, Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church visited Poland for the first time in the history of the Russian-Polish relations. A joint Address to Peoples of Russia and Poland was signed. It urged the two nations to reconcile. However, it did not encourage normalization of relations between Moscow and Warsaw that were burdened by a difficult historic heritage which the Polish government refers to on a regular basis.
Today the Russian-Polish relations are going through the worst period in their history, Yuri Bondarenko, the President of the Russian-Polish Center for Dialogue and Consent, says. “Relations are broken in many spheres of life. A cross-border tourist exchange has recently been stopped between the Kaliningrad Region and the neighboring Polish regions. It is difficult to explain because since 1991 Russia has not done anything that could cause a negative reaction from Poland. On the contrary, the Russian leaders have many times expressed deep condolences and apologies for what happened under Stalin’s rule, I mean Katyn. However, they do not let our bikers enter the Polish territory, even though we welcome the Katyn Raid every year. Monuments to our soldiers are being destroyed in Poland, but nobody in Russia would ever think about destroying Polish monuments,” Bondarenko says.
Trying to explain this socio-political phenomenon, he said: “They spread information in Poland that Russia wants to attack it. Those who incite such talks do not ask why [they are doing it]. Journalists are not always free to write about what really is going on without the propaganda, without the hybrid war. That is why we address people who have such an opportunity – popular bloggers, famous politicians to tell the population what is going on in reality.”
