WARSAW, April 29. /TASS/. A group of Russian bikers, including members of the Nochnye Volki (Night Wolves) club on Wednesday visited the museum located at the site of the former Nazi camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were accompanied by Polish bikers on this trip.
One of the night wolves, Vladimir Vassilyev, told TASS he arrived in Poland from the Czech Republic where he had come by plane and rented a motorcycle.
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"I came here to remind our children of what happened in that camp and to prevent it from happening again," he said.
Miroslaw Wenglorz, a representative of the Polish biking movement called Miezdynarodowy Motocyklowy Rajd Katynski said the Polish bikers wanted to assist their Russian pals and to escort them.
"I joined the rides to Katyn on three occasions and I found a warm reception there," he said. "Now I’d like to show hospitality on my part."
After the laying of flowers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the biking group headed for a Soviet military cemetery in the town of Pszczyna.
On April 24, the Polish authorities took a decision to ban entry of the country’s territory for bikers from the Nochnya Volki all-Russia biking club who were making a ride from Moscow to Berlin on the occasion of the 70th anniversary since VE-Day.
Reports said the decision to ban entry for them had been taken out of the considerations of ‘national security’, since the Night Wolves pose risk for Polish security interests.
Following the incident with the bikers on the Belarusian-Polish border, the Russian Foreign Ministry summoned the ambassador, Katarzyna Pelczynska-Nalecz.
She was told that Moscow expected well-substantiated explanations from Warsaw over the ungrounded and affronting actions undertaken by the Polish authorities, "which cannot be called otherwise than an outrage on the memory of those who gave their lives for the liberation of Europe from Nazism," a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry said.