Poles to block Russian biker club’s trip retracing Red Army march

Poles are outraged by a Russian motorcycle club’s plans to retrace the Red Army’s march into Poland. Russia’s oldest and largest biker group, the Night Wolves, is planning a WW2 tour commemorating 70 years since the war’s end. They will travel through Eastern Europe at the end of April, stopping at war memorials, before arriving in Berlin on May 9. 

The club has links to President Putin and openly supported Pro-Russia operations in Ukraine. 

Critics of the trip say this could pick at old wounds and stoke existing tensions. Already, petitions and multiple Facebook pages have been protesting the event. In Poland, residents are mobilising, with more than nine thousand saying they plan to block the bikers’ passage. A petition with more than 2,600 signatures calls on Poland’s Foreign Minister Grzegorz Schetyna to prevent the bikers’ entry.