Tuesday, May 14

Poland summons Russian ambassador over assassination remark

WARSAW, Poland — The Polish Foreign Ministry summoned the Russian ambassador in protest Friday after a former Russian official instructed that it might be acceptable to assassinate Poland’s ambassador to Russia.

Pavel Astakhov, Russia’s kids’s ombudsman from 2009 to 2016, spoke on a tv program hosted by Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov. He was being interviewed after Polish authorities took over a faculty constructing in Warsaw on Saturday that was serving the youngsters of Russian diplomats and the navy.

Astakhov argued that murdering an envoy in retaliation “for unfriendly actions … is within the framework of international law,” including: “I was taught this well at the KGB school at the counterintelligence faculty.”

That college takeover was the newest of a number of incidents which have added to tensions between Russia and Poland, an ally of Kyiv that has been supplying Ukraine’s navy with weapons.

In the interview with Solovyov, Astakhov referred to Poland’s seizure of different properties, its freezing of Russian financial institution accounts, and an incident final yr wherein an activist in Warsaw doused the Russian ambassador to Poland, Sergey Andreev, with a pink liquid. Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau on the time strongly condemned that incident, calling it “highly deplorable.”

Astakhov stated when Andreev was doused with the liquid, he waited to see “will they find Poland’s ambassador floating in the Moskva River?”

Poland’s Foreign Ministry stated in a press release that it had summoned Andreev and handed him a protest observe about Astakhov’s assertion “calling for the murder of the Ambassador of the Republic of Poland to Moscow.”

“The Polish side protested firmly against this situation and urged that criminal proceedings be instituted immediately and the perpetrator be punished without delay,” spokesman Lukasz Jasina stated.

Poland’s ambassador to Russia is Krzysztof Krajewski, who has had additional safety safety since May 2022, Jasina stated.

Poland has been the goal of a collection of incendiary statements lately by Dmitry Medvedev, the previous Russian president who’s now the deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council chaired by President Vladimir Putin.

In a tweet that has since been eliminated by Twitter, Medvedev stated Saturday that he noticed no level in sustaining diplomatic ties with Poland, and added: “This state must not exist for us while there is no one but Russophobes in power and Ukraine is full of Polish mercenaries, who should be ruthlessly exterminated like stinky rats.”

A Polish anti-hate group, Never Again, has been monitoring Medvedev’s feedback and dealing with another teams to get Twitter to take them down, with combined success.

Rafal Pankowski, the top of the group, stated that he considers a few of Medvedev’s language to be “genocidal” and worries that his feedback, that are written in English for a world viewers, may shift perceptions of the warfare in Russia’s favor.

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