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Spy attack shows Russia is ‘capable of anything’: Polish historian

PR dla Zagranicy
Paweł Kononczuk 19.03.2018 20:00
An attempt to poison an ex-spy in the English city of Salisbury earlier this month shows that Russia is “capable of anything,” a Polish historian has said.

Poland’s foreign minister has said his country is “certain” that Moscow was involved in a suspected nerve agent attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia on March 4.

In an interview published on the wpolityce.pl website, historian Prof. Andrzej Nowak of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) said that the link between the attack in Britain and the date of this weekend’s Russian presidential election “seems obvious.”

‘The whole world hates us’

“It was a reminder to the electorate that we [the Russians] are fighting the whole world, because the whole world hates us and therefore we also have to hate it. I think it was about making the result [of the elections] as strong as possible, and it is strong,” Nowak was cited as saying.

President Vladimir Putin won his biggest ever election victory in the ballot on Sunday.

Nowak said, however, that the Russian leader may have been afraid of “a certain weariness or disappointment among part of the electorate with his rule.”

wpolityce.pl said that Poland was considering expelling Russian diplomats or other measures in a gesture of solidarity with Britain after the attack on Skripal.

Polish presidential plane crash

Nowak said that if new sanctions were to be introduced now, they should be conditional and Moscow should be told that such measures would not be implemented if it returned the wreckage of the Polish presidential plane that crashed eight years ago near Smolensk, western Russia.

The crash on April 10, 2010 killed all 96 on board, including then Polish President Lech Kaczyński, his wife and dozens of political and military top brass.

Despite repeated requests from Warsaw, Russia has refused to return the wreckage of the plane to Poland.

Nowak was asked if the aim of any sanctions by Poland against Russia should be to “convince an international public that Russia is capable of anything.”

He replied: “Exactly. So many people said it was impossible” that Russia was carrying out attacks or assassinations.

“The whole propaganda of the Civic Platform [party which was in power in Poland until late 2015] closed its eyes... to the fact that before 2010 Vladimir Putin’s Russia carried out a whole series of the most brazen attacks on both its own and foreign citizens. And now, when the world has really paid attention to this brazenness, [to the fact] that Russia is capable of anything, it should be reminded” of what Russia is capable of.

The Kremlin has said there is no "clear proof" that Russia is linked to the attack on Skripal in Britain.

(pk/gs)

Source: wpolityce.pl

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