Moscow Urges Warsaw To Punish Those Responsible For Desecration Of Soviet War Monument

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 19th September, 2018) The Russian Foreign Ministry on Tuesday urged Warsaw to bring perpetrators of the attempted attack on the first Soviet-era war memorial in Poland to justice and comply with international obligations on preservation of memorial sites.

Last week, head of the Kursk Military Patriotic Association Jerzy Tyc said that unknown perpetrators attempted to blow up the 18-meters-high war memorial in Poland, located near the Mikolin village in the southwestern Opole voivodeship. The monument is dedicated to the Red Army soldiers killed in 1945 during the WWII Vistula-Oder Offensive.

"We demand to find and punish those guilty, brush up the monument in Mikolin, take exhaustive measures to prevent this kind of unlawful, blasphemous actions in the future," the ministry said in a statement.

Moscow noted that the Polish authorities were busy with discussing whether to take off the Soviet symbols from the monument instead of repairing it and maintaining it in a proper condition.

Poland, where hundreds of Soviet monuments are located, is one of the EU states where such memorials have repeatedly been vandalized over the past years. Moscow has opposed such actions and called on the country's authorities to prevent these acts from happening again.

Moreover, in 2017, the Polish authorities adopted the so-called de-communization law, stipulating the demolition of the Soviet-era monuments and renaming objects associated with the Communist legacy. The move was condemned by Moscow.