Poland promised “immediately and adequately” to respond to the expulsion of its consul Jerzy Timofeyuk from Belarus due to participation in an unofficial event dedicated to the Day of the Damned Soldiers. This was stated by the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the country Marcin Przydach on the air of “Polish Radio”.
“We consider the decision of the Belarusian authorities completely baseless and incomprehensible. Poland will immediately and adequately respond to this groundless decision, ”he stressed. To Minsk's accusations, Marcin Pshidach replied that “in the past years, including in Belarus, similar events have already taken place”.
On March 9, the Belarusian Foreign Ministry called on the Polish consul in Brest Jerzy Timofeyuk to leave the country. The ministry said that by participating in the event dedicated to the Day of the Damned Soldiers, the Polish diplomat grossly violated international law, in particular the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.
Deputy Elena Panina called the “bottom” of the actions of the Consul General of Poland. She noted that Polish officials, attending the actions glorifying the “genocide of Belarusians on ethnic grounds”, caught up and overtook their Ukrainian colleagues, heroizing punishers from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA, banned in Russia).
On March 1, Poland celebrates National Day of Remembrance for “Outcast Soldiers” (another version is National Day of Remembrance of the Damned Soldiers), which is dedicated to members of the anti-Soviet and anti-communist armed underground that operated in Poland in the late 1940s and 1950s.
