WARSAW – The Polish government says that Russian President Vladimir Putin is manipulating World War II-era history in a way that whitewashes Soviet crimes and accuses him of doing it as part of an “information war” against the West.The statement Friday from the government in Warsaw came a day after Putin in a lengthy article in a U.S.
journal insisted on recognizing the Soviet Union as the prime defeater of Nazi Germany and suggested that Poland — a nation that was carved up by the German and Soviet forces and which lost 6 million citizens — bears some blame for the start of World War II.Stanislaw Zaryn, the spokesman for the head of Poland’s security services, called Putin's op-ed as “an element of an ongoing, persistent information war.