Editor's Note: the original version of this post was based on statements by Radek Sikorski, the former Polish foreign minister, that an offer from Vladimir Putin to Donald Tusk to partition Ukraine had taken place. Mr Sikorski has since retracted those statements. The post has been amended to reflect the fact that Mr Sikorski was in error.

DID Vladimir Putin really tell Donald Tusk that Poland should join with Russia in partitioning Ukraine? No, as it turns out, he did not; but Poles spent much of Tuesday thinking he had, due to comments made by Radek Sikorski [pictured above], the former foreign minister. In a story by Ben Judah in Politico, Mr Sikorski was quoted saying that Mr Putin had made the offer to Mr Tusk, the former Polish prime minister soon to be president of the European Council, during a visit to Moscow in February 2008. Mr Sikorski claimed Mr Putin had said that "Ukraine is an artificial country and that Lwow [Lviv] is a Polish city and why don’t we just sort it out together."

The claim of a Russian offer was explosive, and dominated Polish media for much of the day Tuesday. But after an embarrassing series of news conferences, Mr Sikorski was forced to admit it had never happened. A media-savvy former reporter who has handled the press with aplomb for years, Mr Sikorski acknowledged that “my memory failed me,” and that indeed the February 2008 meeting had involved no one-on-one meeting between Mr Tusk and Mr Putin at all. The walk-back is an enormous humiliation for Mr Sikorski, who served seven years as foreign minister and who had for a time been a serious candidate to take the job of the EU's top diplomat. Poland's opposition parties are demanding that he be fired from his current position as speaker of parliament. Ewa Kopacz, the new prime minister, is furious with him.

Mr Sikorski's claim of a Russian offer to split Ukraine played into heightened Polish fears of Russian expansionism over the past year. The vision of larger powers carving up weaker ones is inflammatory here: the country has itself been partitioned twice, once in the 18th century by Russia, Prussia and Austria-Hungary, and again in 1939 by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Now, having retracted the entire story, Mr Sikorski finds his reputation in tatters. The winner is Mr Putin, who can dismiss Mr Sikorski, one of the architects of Europe's forceful policy towards Russia over the past year, as a loose cannon.

But while Mr Sikorski's story about Mr Tusk's visit to Moscow in 2008 was wrong, his characterisations of Russia's longstanding dismissal of Ukrainian sovereignty are on firmer ground. Mr Putin's statements about Russia's special interests there are a matter of public record. In a speech to NATO leaders in Bucharest in April, 2008, Mr Putin said that "17m Russians currently live in Ukraine. Who may state that we do not have any interests there? South, the south of Ukraine, completely, there are only Russians.” Crimea, he said, had been handed to Ukraine at the whim of the Communist Party. (Russia has since annexed the peninsula.) During the same meeting, according to NATO diplomats, Mr Putin told American president George Bush: “You understand, George, that Ukraine isn’t even a state.”

Grzegorz Schetyna, Poland's new foreign minister, insisted gamely on Tuesday night that Polish foreign policy had not been damaged by Mr Sikorski's gaffe. “The matter is closed,” he said. But while Mr Sikorski may be right that Vladimir Putin poses a grave threat both to Ukraine and to Russia's other European neighbours, the tall tale he was forced to retract on Tuesday has made it harder for Poland to make that case.