Last minute of the war, live | Ukraine fears that its troops will have to withdraw from Lugansk | International

Lavrov accuses Germany of rewriting the crimes of Nazism

By Javier G. Cuesta (Moscow). The Kremlin’s line of argument with its population is that fascism has returned to Europe and Russia is the last bastion to combat it. His Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, has insisted on this message during a meeting with the representatives of the Russian regions this Friday, in which he has accused Germany of rehabilitating Nazism with the creation of a center for the historical documentation of their occupation of the continent.

“Its structure is planned in such a way that it not only underestimates in every way the contribution of the Soviet Union and the peoples of the USSR to the defeat of German fascism, but also even hides the crimes of the Third Reich on the Soviet peoples” , assured the minister. According to Lavrov, “Westerners do not give up their attempt to fight with the peoples of the former USSR and use biased interpretations of historical facts to do so.”

The head of Russian diplomacy mentioned the proposal made a few weeks ago by the German Minister of Culture, Claudia Roth, to found the center for the documentation of the German occupation of Europe during World War II, a project promoted by the Bundestag in 2020 to identify the victims of Nazi extermination.

Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz applauded the moment chosen, in the midst of the Russian offensive on Ukraine, to give a boost to a measure that, according to the state media Deutsche Welle, “wants to illustrate the dimension of the Nazis’ reign of terror throughout Europe “. The German leader stressed the importance of Germany remembering its responsibility for those crimes through a center that will focus on the victims of Poland, the Baltic states, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Greece.

The Kremlin justified the entry of its troops into Ukraine to “denazify” a country that was devastated by the Nazi occupation in World War II. According to Vladimir Putin, the governments of Petró Poroshenko and Volodímir Zelenski, recognized by the president himself after his electoral victories in 2014 and 2019, have been controlled by “extremists” and followers of Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist who collaborated with the Third Reich for the independence of its territory. On the other hand, the Russian authorities approved last year a law that punishes with two weeks in prison the comparison of the Nazi regime with that of Stalin, denying “the decisive role” of the USSR in the victory over Hitler and criticizing the Molotov- Ribbentrop of 1939.

The European Parliament condemned that pact between Hitler and Stalin in 2019 on the occasion of its 80th anniversary. The Russian government was furious at the initiative, although this has not always been the position maintained by Putin. A decade earlier, in 2009, he sent a letter to the Polish government saying that “there is no doubt that one can have every reason to condemn the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.” Although he justified it by the concessions given earlier by the allies in Munich and the threat to the USSR from two fronts, one with Germany and the other with Japan, Putin admitted that “today we understand that any collusion with the Nazi regime was morally unacceptable and had no prospects for a practical implementation”.