During Moscow’s ongoing special military operation in Ukraine, Russian soldiers are fighting the "evil" that became possible due to the forgetting of the lessons of history, President Vladimir Putin has stated.
In a telegram to organizers and participants of the events dedicated to 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, Putin stressed that it was the Soviet people who put an end to the barbaric actions of the Nazis in 1945.
According to the Russian president: “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 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 died in the Second World War — Jewish people and representatives of other nationalities — all those who were killed and tortured, the president added.
On January 27, 1945, four Red Army infantry divisions under the command of Marshal Ivan Konev put an end to Auschwitz, the largest concentration camp of the Third Reich. About 1.5 million people, predominantly Jews, as well as thousands of Soviet and Polish prisoners of war, were killed in Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945.
Russia has repeatedly cautioned against rethinking WWII history and whitewashing the Nazis and their collaborators in eastern Europe. In 2014, radicals seized power in Ukraine as a result of a coup, which saw the ouster of then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich, which was followed by Kiev launching the so-called anti-terror operation against self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics in Donbass.
The Ukrainian forces fighting the Donbass republics included a number of neo-Nazi battalions. After Moscow launched its special military operation in Ukraine on February 24, 2022 following the Donbass republics' request to protect them from Kiev's attacks, Russian troops tracked numerous traces of crimes committed by Ukrainian radicals.