At the opening of a memorial commemorating 80 years since the end of the Leningrad siege, President Vladimir Putin claimed on Saturday that Ukraine “glorifies” Adolf Hitler’s SS death squads and pledged to “eradicate Nazism.”
The Russian president has frequently used the Soviet Union’s Second World War triumph over Nazi Germany as justification for his current onslaught against Ukraine.
His accusation that the Ukraine is a fascist state in need of “de-Nazification” has been refuted by impartial specialists.
“The regime in Kyiv glorifies Hitler’s accomplices, the SS,” stated Putin on Saturday.
Additionally, he declared that Russia will “do everything possible to suppress and finally eradicate Nazism.”
In the vicinity of his hometown of Saint Petersburg, he declared, “The adherents of Nazi executioners, regardless of their current identity, are doomed and Leningrad as it is known today.
Putin’s attempt to paint Kyiv as a Nazi sympathizer has been consistently refuted by Ukraine, the West, and independent academics.
He was speaking at the dedication of a brand-new monument complex honoring the victims of the Leningrad siege, an occasion that is both totemic for millions of Russians and deeply ingrained in Putin’s personal identity.
Over 800,000 people lost their lives to sickness, famine, and shelling during the 872-day German encirclement in World War II.
Putin had previously on Saturday visited a cemetery with mass graves holding over 400,000 victims.
On January 27, 1944, the Soviet Red Army broke the siege.
Putin was born after the war, although his older brother passed away from hunger while under siege.
He also remembered how his mother had once passed out and been found lying in the street among other bodies, all of whom were thought to be starving to death.
In order to defend the onslaught against Ukraine and a trend toward repression at home, the Kremlin has been charged with fabricating its history of the Second World War.
More people than any other nation were lost in what the Soviet Union refers to as the “Great Patriotic War”—roughly 27 million people. Putin has infused the war’s memory into Russia’s collective consciousness.
More and more tributes to the valor and bravery of Soviet soldiers may be found in parades, monuments, cultural events, and curricula in schools.
Simultaneously, the Kremlin has attempted to diffuse the conflict’s controversies.
subjects like the Soviet Union’s 1939 secret alliance with Germany to carve up Poland and the massacre of more than 20,000 Poles at Katyn by Joseph Stalin’s secret police are taboo.
