World War II was the Fault of Poland

[Thanas]

..or so the Russian ambassador to Poland thinks.

The Russian ambassador to Poland has sparked outrage for putting some of the blame for World War II on Poland, creating a new spat amid deepening tensions between the Slavic nations.

Russian Ambassador Sergey Andreev on 25 September described the Soviet's 1939 invasion of Poland as an act of self-defense, not aggression. The comment prompted Poland's Foreign Ministry to declare on 26 September that the ambassador “undermines historical truth” and seems to be trying to justify Stalinist crimes.

World War II began after Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union sealed a pact in 1939 that included a secret provision to carve up Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe. Germany soon invaded Poland from the West, followed by a Soviet invasion from the east 16 days later. Millions of Poles were killed in the war.

In an interview broadcast on the private TVN station, Andreev also said: “Polish policy led to the disaster in September 1939, because during the 1930s Poland repeatedly blocked the formation of a coalition against Hitler's Germany. Poland was therefore partly responsible for the disaster which then took place.”

Poland's Foreign Ministry expressed “surprise and alarm” at those comments, and Foreign Minister Grzegorz Schetyna summoned Andreev for a meeting on Monday on the matter.

“The narrative presented by the highest official representative of the Russian state in Poland undermines the historical truth and reflects the most hypocritical interpretation of the events known from the Stalinist and communist years,” the ministry said in a statement.

You see, the Russians just had to defend themselves by invading another country and deliberately exterminating its intelligentsia.

[AMX]

Is there a full quote available somewhere?
I see no way that snippet can be interpreted as "our unprovoked attack was self defense."

[Simon_Jester]

I would actually be interested to know what neutral third parties with a broader and more unbiased knowledge of WWII history thinks of the proposition "Poland was obstructionist in attempts to form a coalition against Hitler."

Because most of what I know about the prewar diplomacy is either fairly generalist-level knowledge (what you could learn from reading a good timeline or two), or it comes from a biased source I happened to read in college (Churchill).

I'm guessing that the response to that claim was "no." The only allies Poland could realistically have courted in a useful fashion would be, oh, Czechoslovakia, Russia, France, and Britain. They DID court the latter two. Courting Russia would have been an invitation to disaster given the Russian predilection for moving in on and deposing the governments of their neighbors (plus Russia and Poland had fought a war fifteen years earlier involving a Russian invasion that was only turned back near Warsaw, as I recall). Now, Czechoslovakia... well, Poland did actually seize a few bits of Czechoslovak land during the Munich crisis, and frankly that was a bad move...

[K. A. Pital]

They're just stoking anti-Polish sentiment for political gain. Very easy to do.