Today, the Speaker of the Polish Parliament, Elżbieta Witek, commemorated the 81st anniversary of the Soviet Union’s aggression against Poland by laying flowers at the Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East, located in Warsaw.
On September 17 in 1939, breaking the Polish-Soviet non-aggression pact, the Red Army entered the territory of the Second Polish Republic from the East.
The Soviet attack on Poland was the implementation of the treaty signed in Moscow on August 23 in 1939, by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Third Reich, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union, Vyacheslav Molotov, who also was Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (Prime Minister).
The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact established ‘spheres of interests of Germany and the USSR’ on Polish territory. After the USSR attacked Poland, over 200.000 people were arrested – officers, policemen, landowners, representatives of the intelligentsia. The citizens of the Second Polish Republic were forced to have Soviet citizenship. Mass deportations to Siberia covered 1.350.000 Poles. About 22.5 thousand officers and policemen were killed in Katyn, Kharkiv and Miednoje.