Talking to the Polsat News broadcaster he said that "we have another confirmation of who Putin is and what Russia is today" and that Russia has hostile intentions not only towards Ukraine but towards the whole of Europe.
Radek Pietruszka/PAP

Poland’s deputy foreign minister has condemned the Russian president’s recent statements alleging Poland has territorial ambitions in Ukraine and said that falsifying history is a weapon that Vladimir Putin uses in a hybrid war.

On Friday, Putin told a meeting of his Security Council in televised remarks that “Poland’s leaders likely seek to set up a coalition under the Nato umbrella and directly join the conflict in Ukraine, and then ‘tear off’ a wider piece for themselves, restore their, as they believe, historical territory – today’s western Ukraine.”

He also said that “it was thanks to the Soviet Union, thanks to (Joseph) Stalin’s position that Poland received significant territories in the West, the German lands”.

It’s just like this: the western territory of today’s Poland is Stalin’s gift to the Poles. Have our friends in Warsaw forgotten about it? We will remind them,” Putin added.

Later on Friday, Poland’s deputy foreign minister, Paweł Jabłoński, reacted to Putin’s statements.

Talking to the Polsat News broadcaster he said that “we have another confirmation of who Putin is and what Russia is today” and that Russia has hostile intentions not only towards Ukraine but towards the whole of Europe.

“Putin dreams of returning to Stalin’s times. Talking about the alleged gifts that we were supposed to receive from Stalin, he is of course cynically lying, because we have lost a much larger part of our territory, we have been conquered by the Soviets, we have been occupied by them for almost five decades,” Jabłoński argued.

“We need to remind ourselves of this all the time, because falsifying history is also Putin’s weapon used by him in a hybrid war,” he added.