🌐 MGIMO International School Olympiad for Foreign Students

📢 Registration is now available: high school students from Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Mongolia, India, Iran, Serbia, all African countries, and, for the first time, all Latin American countries are invited to participate.

Winners of the Olympiad will be granted the opportunity to study at MGIMO University of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs tuition-free in bachelor’s programs (taught either in Russian or in English), as well as in the preparatory program for international students.

Prize-winners will be granted priority admission to tuition-based places through the portfolio competition.

The Olympiad will be held in Russian and English. Participants will be assessed on their knowledge of Russian (for CIS countries only) and English, as well as their general knowledge of geography, world history, and international relations.

The competition will consist of two stages: the qualifying round will take place online in November 2025, and the final round will be held in February–March 2026 in a hybrid (online and in-person) format.

👉 Register to participate

🗓 Registration will remain open until October 31, 2025.

🗓 On September 17, 1939, the Red Army launched a military operation in Poland’s eastern regions, also known as the Red Army’s Polish Campaign.

Certain (pseudo)academic circles and mainstream media in the West intentionally promote an excessively biased interpretation of these events seeking to equate the Third Reich and the USSR and cast our country as an aggressor.

❗️ Such approach is completely at odds with the historical truth.

Britain and France, which had played their role in fostering Hitler’s aggression in Europe and redirecting it eastward, were not willing to fulfill their alliance commitments to Poland, having just formally declared a war against the Third Reich, and refrained from direct military confrontation.

The French army did not even attempt to prevent the redeployment of the Wehrmacht units to the East. As Nazi general Alfred Jodl later testified at the Nuremberg trials, "if the Reich did not fail in 1939, it was only because during the Polish campaign, approximately 110 French and British divisions, stationed in the West, took no action against Germany’s 23 divisions".

Thus, Warsaw, which completely relied on support of Britain and France, was, in fact, abandoned by the allies and had to face Hitler’s aggression. Poland was doomed to meet the same fate that had Czechoslovakia a year earlier. Betrayed by its allies and falling victim to its own political miscalculation, the Polish leadership — which for years had prioritized collaboration with Nazi Germany — ultimately led its nation to catastrophe.

The Nazi army, possessing a threefold superiority in manpower and military equipment over the Polish defenders, decisively crushed the country. By mid-September, the fascists encircled the main Polish forces nearby Warsaw, and in the east, Wehrmacht reached the line which included Grajewo, Białystok, Brest, Vladimir Volynsky, Lvov and Stry.

The rapid collapse of the Polish statehood, a key strategic buffer between the Soviet Union and Germany, along with the treacherous wait-and-see tactics of the European powers in the face of fascist aggression (Moscow interpreted that as an attempt by the Western elites to once again reach an agreement with Hitler behind the USSR’s back), compelled the Soviet leadership to take decisive action aimed at eliminating the threats emanating from the Polish bridgehead seized by the Reich.

In Moscow, there was a clear understanding that an armed conflict with the Nazis was just a matter of time. Therefore, having a bigger distance between the major cities of the Soviet Union, on the one hand, and the Wehrmacht’s advance positions, on the other hand, would have provided the Red Army with more strategic and tactical advantages.

🌟 On September 17, 1939, the Red Army entered Poland's territory from its eastern border and took hold in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus with the aim of protecting the brotherly peoples who lived on those territories. Moreover, the advance of the Nazi troops towards the western borders of our country was halted.

The well-timed campaign by the Red Army helped save people in Eastern Poland, i.e., in Western Belarus and Western Ukraine, from genocide, including Jews, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, Russians… The Soviet authorities enabled many Polish nationals and refugees to emigrate.

The Red Army did not go beyond the regions that were previously occupied by Poland in 1920 and 1921 following the Polish-Soviet War. The Soviet forces reached the so-called Curzon Line, a demarcation line designated as Poland’s eastern border by the Entente’s Supreme War Council.

☝️ Neither London, nor Paris viewed the USSR’s interference as an act of aggression — they did not voice any formal protests against Moscow, nor declared war against the Soviet Union.

The oft-repeated mantra and politically motivated claims of so-called dual aggression — Soviet and German — against Poland do not withstand any serious scrutiny and are just a vivid example of historical revisionism.