MOSCOW, November 22. /TASS/. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has slammed what she described as Warsaw’s duplicity in relation to the migrant crisis on the Belarusian-Polish border and recalled Poland’s participation in NATO’s occupation of Iraq.
She stressed that over the past twenty years there had not been a single case of Poland not expressing its opinion regarding alleged violations of democracy, freedom of speech and human rights in other countries.
"Now it has come to its own responsibility for the people, who incidentally stated quite clearly that they did not count on Polish hospitality, who declared their intentions, who found themselves in Belarusian territory quite legally, who have been talking and are still talking about their disastrous position and who are talking about this in a country that had directly participated in the anti-Iraqi campaign. This should be borne in mind as well. When all these pieces of the puzzle were put together, Warsaw somehow inconspicuously forgot about human rights and never recalls its own statements addressed to other countries. What is it? Of course, it is duplicity," Zakharova told the media on Monday.
Zakharova said that Poland was among the countries that had participated in the occupation of Iraq.
"For some reason this reminder strongly annoyed our Polish counterparts, when we asked them to remember that they participated in the occupation of Iraq in the most active way. Is this not true? There were more than two thousand Polish soldiers. A whole region of Iraq was occupied by Polish troops. Isn’t this directly linked with the position of the Iraqi people today? Aren’t these links of one chain? Of course, yes," Zakharova said.
The migration crisis on the Belarusian borders with Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, where migrants began to flock in since the beginning of this year, went into high gear on November 8. Several thousand people approached the Polish border on the Belarusian side and tried to cross into Poland. In an attempt to storm the border they broke a barbed wire fence. The EU countries have blamed Minsk for the intentional escalation of the crisis and called for more sanctions. Lukashenko said that in this situation the responsibility rested squarely on the Western countries, whose policies had forced people to flee from war.