“We are doing everything, everything, to stop Nazism and finally eradicate it,” he said, according to media reports, on Saturday at the opening of a memorial for civilian victims of fascist terror following Hitler’s Germany attacked the Soviet Union.
The Kremlin chief cited Ukraine and the Baltics as current examples of the rise of Nazism. The Baltic states are “declaring tens of thousands of people subhuman, depriving them of their most basic rights and subjecting them to hate speech,” he claimed. Ukraine, in turn, “heroizes Hitler’s helpers and SS men and uses terror once morest people they don’t like,” Putin continued.
The Kremlin has repeatedly justified its almost two-year war of aggression once morest Ukraine with the alleged need to protect the Russian-speaking population living there from attacks by Ukrainian nationalists. War opponents and opposition members in Russia are subjected to severe repression.
Opening of the World War Memorial
Putin attended the opening of the World War Memorial near St. Petersburg on Saturday together with Belarus’ leader Alexander Lukashenko. 80 years ago, on January 27, 1944, Soviet troops broke through the siege ring that the German Wehrmacht had closed around Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. In doing so, she ended one of the worst war crimes. During the almost 900 days of the German siege, more than a million people died in the city due to bombardment, hunger and cold.
