[TremendousJudge]

The territory that today is western poland was part of Germany pre-1939. It wasn't an occupation, it was just that territory of that country. Afaik, most of what was eastern Poland pre-1939 and was occupied by the Russians, nowadays is no longer Polish territory. The boundaries migrated west.

[adrian_b]

Yes indeed.

The Poland of after WWII has a similar area with the Poland of before WWII, but it has moved a lot towards West.

So the winners have been the Russians and the losers have been the Germans.

Poland was lucky because its large territorial losses to the Russian invaders have been somewhat compensated with territories taken from Germany.

The other Western neighbors of Russia have been much less lucky. The larger neighbors (Finland, Czechoslovakia, Romania) have lost large territories stolen by Russia without any compensation, while the smaller neighbors (the 3 lesser Baltic countries) have been incorporated completely in the Soviet Union.

I have written "the 3 lesser Baltic countries" because prior to WWII Finland was counted as the 4th Baltic country, since all 4 countries occupy the Eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, and they all form an enclave between Germanic-speaking people to the West and Slavic-speaking people to the East (the main languages in Finland and Estonia are Uralic, while the main languages in Lithuania and Latvia belong to the Baltic branch of the Indo-European languages).

For example, in the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact from 1939, the Russians have written explicitly their intentions to occupy all the 4 Baltic countries (Finland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia) and also Romania, and the Germans agreed with this, while the Russians agreed that the countries of Western Europe should belong to Germany.

[thriftwy]

The german territories were given to Poland by USSR, not taken by Poland.

With regards to eastern territories, Poland may reclaim some of those right now if it is insistent :)

[agapon]

Russian troll detected.

[thriftwy]

Seriously though, all of these russophobic eastern european countries are like: "Russia took our lands".

First of all, it was not Russia but USSR who took your lands; second, USSR did not give these lands to Russia (even in the form of RSFSR) but to other russophobic eastern european countries.

You are grown-ups now. Sort it out between yourselves.

[thereddaikon]

Russia is officially the successor state of the USSR. So legally yes, the USSR is Russia in so far as anyone cares for the purposes of assigning blame.

[coddingtonbear]

I don't really want to get involved in this argument, but I think this is a situation where there's just a little bit of missing historical background that might help you two understand one another. What the upstream commenter is referring to is the fact that the land that was historically eastern Poland isn't part of Russia now -- it's part of Ukraine and Belarus. Sure, the USSR (of which Russia is the successor state) is what performed that land transfer, but the land was not transferred to what is now Russia.

[klausjensen]

The Russian delusions around WW2 are astonishing.

They (USSR was Russian-lead) were literally allied with Nazi-Germany and agreed to split Europe with them. They executed 20000+ Polish people in Katyn alone.

[thriftwy]

Yes, USSR had a pact with Nazi Germany. Until it hadn't.

So?

[mkotowski]

Part of it was, yes. But going by the image from the tweet, there are many regions recovered, that belonged to the Second Polish Republic and still contained quite sizeable Polish-speaking population. [0]

[0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GUS_languages1931_Po...

[em-bee]

well, it depends on how far back you look in history. poland was split up between prussia, austria and russia in the 18th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland#/media/File:Rzeczpospol...