The Polish parliament adopted a resolution Wednesday condemning the Soviet invasion of Poland at the start of World War II.
Moscow swiftly criticized the resolution as "worthless politics based on lies."
Lawmakers in Poland's lower house, the Sejm, unanimously passed the resolution on Wednesday to mark the 70th anniversary of the Soviet attack on Poland on Sept. 17, 1939.
In the resolution, they also condemned the 1940 Soviet massacre of 22,000 Polish officers, intellectuals and priests at Katyn. The lawmakers declared that the massacre had "the characteristics of genocide."
In Moscow, Russian lawmakers sharply criticized the resolution. Russian leaders bristle at criticism of Moscow's World War II-era actions and reject efforts to equate the Soviet Union with Hitler's Germany.
Oleg Morozov, a deputy speaker of Russia's lower house of parliament from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's dominant United Russia party, called the resolution "worthless politics based on lies," according to the state news agency RIA Novosti.
He accused Polish lawmakers of "dancing on bones of Poles who gave their lives together with millions of Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Jews and others in the fight against fascism," RIA-Novosti reported.
Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both invaded Poland in 1939 based on a secret agreement known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Polish lawmakers also condemned that, saying it made Poland "a victim of the two totalitarian systems: Nazism and Communism."
Morozov defended the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the secret protocol under which Hitler and Stalin divided up Eastern Europe, saying before it was signed, "all the countries of Europe, including Poland, flirted with Hitler in the most active way and sought profit from it."
