Kosovo
The Russian defense ministry last week touched off an uproar with Moscow’s most defiant neighbor, Poland. The ministry’s website posted a paper by a mid-level functionary, Col. Sergei Kovalyov, who directs an official “scientific-research department of military history.” The argument of the paper, titled “Fictions and Falsifications in Evaluating the USSR’s Role On the Eve of World War II,” was direct and brutal.

According to Kovalyov, “the war began because of Poland’s refusal to satisfy Germany’s claims.” Nazi demands on the Polish republic were described by the learned officer as “quite reasonable.” These amounted to reoccupation of Danzig (now Gdansk), then with an ethnic German majority, under the authority of Berlin, and surrender of a territorial corridor between Germany and East Prussia (the latter is mainly now a Russian-ruled enclave called Kaliningrad).