The Czech Foreign Ministry has rejected false claims that Poland is seeking to reclaim Czech territory, as a suspected Russian disinformation campaign exploits a historical border dispute to stoke tensions between the two neighbors.
In a post online on Wednesday, the ministry said: “In connection with the spread of false information about alleged Polish territorial claims to the Czech Republic, we want to set the record straight.
“Poland is one of the Czech Republic’s closest and most important partners.” The post added that the two “countries work closely together” and that they were pursuing a “practical and mutually beneficial solution” to the historical dispute.
A social media campaign emerged this week falsely claiming that Poland wants to annex Zaolzie, the Polish name for the historical border region that Polish forces seized from Czechoslovakia in 1938.
Much of the land, which had a large ethnic Polish population and was the subject of a brief Polish-Czechoslovak war in 1919, was returned to Czechoslovakia following the end of World War II.
However, the campaign exploited cherry-picked and misinterpreted facts about a separate historical border issue to further its claim Poland was seeking to reclaim Czech territory by force.
A 1958 treaty left Czechoslovakia with about 368 hectares more territory than Poland, an imbalance Warsaw considers an unresolved “territorial debt” but one it has sought to settle diplomatically...
The Czech Foreign Ministry has rejected false claims that Poland is seeking to reclaim Czech territory, as a suspected Russian disinformation campaign exploits a historical border dispute to stoke...