VATICAN REJECTS SOVIET EXCUSES " Their Pretext Has No Value "

The Vatican serni-offlcial newspaper, Osservatore Romano, rejects the Soviet excuses for their theft of the greater part of Poland.
" The Soviet pretext that they are liberating the Ukrainians and White Russians loses all its value," writes the Osservatore, " since the Soviet line advances as far as Warsaw, in the heart of Poland, and since the line of demarcation gives them authority over a vast territory inhabited exclusively by Poles."
The Vatican newspaper claims that the U.S.S.R. hes not yet revealed its true motives for going as far as the Vistula, "that historic river whence it was chased by the heroic Poles in 1920, thus preserving from the Bolshevist peril not only Poland but also all Europe.
"Moscow," adds the Osservatore, "tries to justify its coup by the necessity of protecting the populations of White Russia and the Carpathian Ukraine.
" In point of fact these peoples have never ,once in the last twenty-five years appealed for Russian protection.
" On the contrary the Ukrainians in particular have become the ardent promoters of an irredentist movement, not to place their country—which happily was outside the Soviet hell—under the Russian yoke, but to encourage the struggle for the independence of the Ukraine, which has now become a Soviet republic without liberty, without self-government, and without any national and racial dignity."