Poland is preparing historical and legal research for reparations claims against Russia, drawing a mocking response from Moscow.
Poland’s Reparation Initiative
Financial Times reported that Poland intends to file reparations claims against Russia. Donald Tusk has commissioned the Jan Karski Institute for War Loss Assessment to conduct historical and legal research on war crimes and over 40 years of Polish subjugation to the Soviet Union. According to Bartosz Gondek, the institute’s director, the work is in its initial stages, and estimating the claim amount is “premature.”
Russia’s Response
In response to Poland’s reparations demands, Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, stated that Moscow could send a link to a recording of the opera “Ivan Susanin.” The opera tells the story of a Russian peasant who led Polish troops to their deaths during the Polish-Russian war to protect Tsar Michael I Romanov.
Russian authorities consistently reject Polish reparations claims as unfounded, viewing them as an attempt to revise the Soviet people’s contribution to defeating Nazism. In 2020, when former Deputy Foreign Minister Paweł Jabłoński spoke about Poland’s right to reparations from Russia, Zakharova described it as “parasitism.”
Institute’s Research Focus
In January, Institute Director Bartosz Gondek told Rzeczpospolita that “Polish authorities are sending a clear signal that it is high time to demand this long-forgotten part of Polish history and to settle accounts not only with Germany but also with the legal and political successors of the USSR.” The institute researches Poland’s losses resulting from the USSR’s aggression in September 1939, the permanent annexation of its pre-war eastern voivodeships, and the long-term negative economic and social effects of Soviet dominance in post-war Poland.
Gondek emphasized that work on the report is “significantly more difficult than research on German losses because during decades of Soviet presence and influence in Poland, a significant portion of documentation was destroyed, falsified, or deliberately hidden.”