Why the graves of Polish heroes are being dug up in Belarus
Much of the ire of what we might call “Team Putin,” a vast if ragtag army of trolls, hackers and propagandists has been directed at Poland. One senior Kremlin official even claimed that Poland is seeking to seize land in Ukraine. In the real world, Poland has sheltered 2.5 million Ukrainians and is a steadfast supporter of the Ukrainian defense against Russian aggression.
Poland is also home to thousands of Belarusian dissidents, opposed to the regime of Putin’s closest ally Alexsandr Lukashenko. This may explain why the Belarusian leader has been accused of carrying out a bizarre, if sinister campaign to target Poland: going after its heroic dead.
Pictures circulated on Twitter last week showing freshly dug up graves in western Belarus. The graves belong to fighters from the Polish Home Army, a resistance force that opposed both the Nazi and Soviet occupation of Poland during the Second World War. One of the grave sites belonged to 89 Polish partisans who had died fighting the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. At least three sites, on land that at the onset of the Second World War belonged to Poland, were destroyed last week.
So why is Putin’s Belarusian friend digging up the past?
Aliaksandr Papko, an EAST Center analyst and journalist at Belsat TV, says that in “recent months after this full scale invasion on Ukraine started, the state propaganda, of course, has become more aggressive towards Poland.”