Rewriting history right in your face

Not allies? Really?

At the request of Russia, the Associated Press Agency removed a fragment from its cable, in which the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were described as former allies. The cable, which had been already published by the media around the world, concerning the anniversary of the murder of the Jewish community of one of the cities in Ukraine.

The text contained the sentence that "in June 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union, its former ally." The Israeli daily, Haaretz, wrote that the AP changed the content of the cable under pressure from Russia.

The agency explained that the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, signed by Moscow and Berlin on the eve of World War II, did not make Germany and the Soviet Union allies. "This pact was never officially recognized as an alliance, and Germany in 1941 attacked the USSR, which in a coalition with allies, including Great Britain, the United States and other nations, fought for four years to defeat the Nazis," reads the new version of the message.

Russian embassy in Israel also asked Haaretz to change its article in a letter that says that the phrase "former allies" is "a living example of attempts to rewrite history and distort the truth," because "the USSR has never been an ally of Nazi Germany."

In three days, on September 17th, Poland will commemorate an anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. The invasion was a military operation without a formal declaration of war. Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, sixteen days after Germany invaded Poland from the west. Subsequent military operations lasted for the following 20 days and ended on 6 October 1939 with the two-way division and the annexation of the entire territory of the Second Polish Republic of Germany and the Soviet Union.

The joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland was secretly agreed to following the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact on 23 August 1939.