DISINFO: The Red Army could not support the Warsaw Uprising
SUMMARY
The Red Army, exhausted by a two-month offensive in Belarus and experiencing a deficit in ammunition and fuel, stopped its advance near Warsaw.
The failure of the Warsaw Uprising is mainly caused by its poor preparation and wrong political calculations of the Polish Government-in-exile. This Government did not have enough own forces, but it still did not want to cooperate with Moscow in preparation of the Uprising.
Despite the fact that the Red Army delivered weapons and ammunition to the Polish fighters by planes, it could not change the course of events.
RESPONSE
A common Soviet and Russian disinformation narrative aimed to prove that Soviet troops could not support the Warsaw Uprising due to numerous objective reasons (such as the lack of necessary forces, overstretched supply lines, lack of communication with the Polish Home Army and the Polish Government in London, etc.). This message should be perceived as a part of the Kremlin’s policy of historical revisionism.
The Warsaw Uprising was the largest single military action realized by any European resistance movement during World War II – the number of Polish soldiers and civilians fighting in the Uprising was between 20 and 50 thousand.
According to Norman Davies, there is a consensus among the majority of Polish and Western historians that it was a political decision of Stalin not to support the Uprising in order to let German troops destroy the forces of the Home Army (which tried to re-establish the independent Polish state). During the Uprising, Soviet Troops were situated in very close proximity to Warsaw, but they did not receive orders to assist. Moreover, the Soviet authorities hampered the flights of the British Royal Air Force supporting the Uprising (by not allowing Allied planes to land on the Soviet-controlled territory).
According to Polish historians, the archive materials of the Russian Ministry of Defence show that the Red Army units deployed near Warsaw during the Uprising did not have any problems with ammunition and fuel - they were ready for a large-scale offensive, but they did not receive such an order from the Kremlin.
Read other examples of Russian historical revisionism concerning Poland - Poland planned to take part in the partition of the USSR together with Nazi Germany, Poland posed a military threat to the USSR in 1938-1939 and Poland re-writes the history of the Warsaw Uprising accusing the USSR of its failure.