Ukrainian neo-Nazis terrorize people, commit ethnic cleansing: Putin
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Russian President Vladimir Putin says that any attempt to revise Russia’s contribution to the Great Victory means justifying the crimes of Nazism and opening the way for the revival of its deadly ideology.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a Security Council meeting via videoconference at the Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow, Russia, Friday, Jan. 27, 2023 (, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
Attempts to revise Russia’s role in the WWII victory pave the way for reviving Nazism’s “deadly ideology," Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned in a telegram to organizers of and participants in the events prepared for the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of Victims of the Holocaust and the 78th anniversary of the liberation by the Red Army of the prisoners of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
During the ongoing special military operation in Ukraine, Russian soldiers fight the evil that became possible because lessons of history have been forgotten, Putin has stated, stressing that it was the Soviet people who ended the barbaric actions of the Nazis in 1945.
Read: War in Ukraine: A conflict that will decide the global system's fate
“We must clearly understand that any attempt to revise our country’s contribution to the Great Victory actually means justifying the crimes of Nazism, and opens the way for the revival of its deadly ideology,” the Russian President noted.
“The forgetting of the lessons of history leads to the repetition of terrible tragedies. Evidence of this is the crimes against civilians, ethnic cleansing, and punitive actions that are being organized by neo-Nazis in Ukraine. It is with this evil that our warriors are fighting courageously, shoulder to shoulder,” Putin underscored.
Russia mourns the millions who passed in World War II, Jewish and representatives of other nationalities, the president added.
On January 27, 1945, under the command of Marshal Ivan Konev, four Red Army infantry divisions put an end to Auschwitz, the largest concentration camp of the Third Reich. About 1.5 million individuals died between 1940 and 1945 in Auschwitz. The prisoners were Jews and Soviet and Polish prisoners of war.
Russia has repeatedly warned against revising WWII history and whitewashing the Nazis and their allies in eastern Europe.
In 2014, radicals grabbed power in Ukraine following a coup that ousted then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Later, Kiev launched the so-called anti-terror operation against the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics in Donbass.
The Ukrainian forces fighting the Donbass republics included several neo-Nazi battalions. After Moscow's special military operation in Ukraine, Russian troops tracked numerous traces of crimes committed by Ukrainian radicals.
Read: Russia security forces thwart terrorist attack by Ukrainian radicals
