Did the Vice Speaker of the Polish Senate say that “Ukrainians are dying for the right to be homosexuals”? 

In mid-February 2023, a quote from Polish politician Michal Kaminski about what values, in his opinion, Ukrainian soldiers are fighting for, circulated in the Russian-language press and social networks. We decided to check if his words really sounded like that.

Kaminski was quoted as saying "Arguments of the week", "Public news service", "Ukraine.ru", "Constantinople", regional portals "Novorossiya", "Yakutsk” and other media (and some even included the words of the Polish politician in the headline). The quote also spread on social networks: for example, in the Telegram channel “Kot Kostyan - official channel"The corresponding publication received 147,000 views at the time of writing this analysis. Kaminsky’s statement was also distributed on VKontakte, for example in the public page of the publication “Political navigator", in the group "Internet review of Russian watch" And others. Sold out it's in Twitter, and in LiveJournal a quote posted State Duma deputy Oleg Matveychev wrote on his blog.

Interview, in question, Vice-Speaker of the Polish Senate Michal Kaminski gave to the Polish radio station Zet on September 21, 2022. Five days later, the Russian portal InoSMI, specializing in translations of articles and video materials from foreign publications, published on your YouTube channel there is an excerpt from this interview with Russian subtitles. There is also a text version on their website translation.

This is what a Polish politician says: “This conflict (Russia’s war with Ukraine - Note: “Verified”), and the Polish government forgets about this, is primarily a conflict of values. Ukrainians today are dying for the right to be homosexual*, for the right to be leftist, rightist, Catholic, Orthodox Christian or atheist. And for the right to choose your own president, deputies, senators, anyone.” “In general, do Ukrainians die for democracy?” — the presenter clarifies. And Kaminsky answers her: “They are dying for freedom, democracy and European integration.”

That is, the vice-speaker of the Polish Senate actually said the phrase “Ukrainians are dying for the right to be homosexual,” but immediately after that he listed other “Western values,” as they were called in some Russian media: freedom to choose religion and political views, participate in fair elections and vote in them. And yes, among other things, Kaminsky mentioned homosexuality, but to reduce his entire speech only to sexual orientation is, at the very least, manipulation. It is noteworthy that InoSMI itself, which provides a translation of the politician’s entire remark, only included the phrase about “the right to be homosexual” in its headline.

*In the analysis, we used verbatim quotes with incorrect and outdated words from the original source. “Verified” does not support linguistic discrimination and advises using neutral expressions recommended by the directory “We don't say that”, in particular, not “homosexual”, but “homosexual”.

Cover photo: YouTube channel Radio Zet

Taken out of context

What do our verdicts mean?

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