The Russian president claims that the governments of Ukraine and the Baltic states have adopted “Hitlerites’ ideology and methods”
FILE PHOTO. © JENS SCHLUETER / AFP
Russian President Vladimir Putin has vowed to crush modern-day forces that promote Nazism, singling out Ukraine and the Baltic states as countries where the authorities have embraced such ideologies.
Speaking on Saturday at the opening of a memorial to Soviet civilians killed by Nazi German forces in Leningrad Region, the Russian head of state said: “these days the outcomes of the Nuremberg trials are effectively being revised.” He claimed that some countries have gone from rewriting history and whitewashing the Nazis to “arming themselves with Hitlerites’ ideology and methods.”
President Putin cited the Baltic states, in an apparent reference to their treatment of Russian-speaking minorities, which Moscow deems discriminatory.
“The regime in Kiev lionizes Hitlers’ accomplices, SS members, and uses terror against” those who resist it, the Russian leader alleged, accusing the Ukrainian authorities of subjecting the elderly, women and children to “barbaric shelling.”
According to President Putin, “in a number of European countries, Russophobia is being promoted as the state policy.”
“We will do everything – everything to undercut and eradicate Nazism for good,” the Russian head of state pledged.
He went on to predict that modern-day proponents of the Nazi ideology are doomed.
Putin noted that January 27 marks 80 years since the Soviet Army broke the Nazi Siege of Leningrad, which began in September 1941 and claimed the lives of more than a million civilians.
President Putin’s own parents lived through the ordeal. Indeed, his older brother succumbed to diphtheria at the age of two in the besieged city.
He noted that Nazi Germany was conducting a genocide of the Soviet population, leaving a deep scar on all generations since, with memories never fading away over the past eight decades.
In his New Year’s address to Russians, former President Dmitry Medvedev said that the “ultimate defeat” of neo-Fascism, an ideology “Russia’s enemies are trying to rekindle” should be the country’s “main goal” in 2024.
Earlier in December, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told AFP that Moscow “will not allow the existence on our borders of an aggressive Nazi state.”
She added that the goal of “denazification” of Ukraine proclaimed by President Putin back in February 2022 remain unchanged.
