President Vladimir Putin has accused the West of revising for attempts to “insult” Russia by rewriting the history of World War II, as Moscow prepares for the parade in Red Square, which marks the Soviet victory, an event postponed due to the coronavirus.
In an editorial in “The National Interest,” a conservative US publication, Putin warned of “historic revisionism”, saying that minimizing the Soviet Union’s role in World War II helped undermine the current world order, AFP writes.
“In some official statements commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, all participants in the anti-Hitler coalition, except the Soviet Union, are mentioned,” Putin complained, according to Mediafax.
An estimated 27 million Russian soldiers and civilians were killed in World War II, and the Red Army’s triumph is a source of national pride in Russia.
Putin was disturbed by the European Parliament’s 2019 resolution, which noted that the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, two totalitarian regimes, one Nazi, one communist, and the division of Europe into zones of influence, paved the way for World War II.
“I think it’s unacceptable to equalize the e-keepers with the occupiers,” he wrote.
Putin blamed Western powers and Poland in particular for various treaties signed with Nazi Germany before the conflict began in 1939.
“We don’t know if there are secret protocols or annexes to agreements of several countries with the Nazis,” Putin says.
The article was published Friday in the state-owned Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper. Putin said he plans to write an article about the legacy of World War II as early as last year.
Under Putin, victory in World War II increasingly dominated public rhetoric, and critics accused him of trying to use history to increase his personal power.
On Wednesday, June 24, Russia is due to hold a massive military parade on Red Square after being postponed due to the coronavirus. The parade will also be attended by 75 Moldovan soldiers, along with the country’s President Igor Dodon. We recall that the decision of the head of state to participate in the pandemic in the parade on 24 June, together with 75 soldiers of the Guard of Honor, was harshly criticized. And the pictures published on the evening of the soldiers’ departure to Moscow have aroused a wave of discontent. The head of the state was accused of inconsistency. Former Finance Minister Veaceslav Negruța referred to Igor Dodon’s statements of 12 June that “Moldovans do not listen to the doctors’ advice, they climb into minibusses as in the sprat bank, 40 on top of each other”. “June 14: 75 young people in the same enclosed space and also like “sprats” in a tube, based on a doctor’s order, contrary to doctors’ advice, contrary to the prohibitions ordered,” Negruța wrote on the Facebook page. Moreover, the scandal has also been escalated by the fact that at the parade in 24 Moscow, moldovan soldiers will parade commonly with soldiers from the separatist areas of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, territories occupied by the military aggression of the Russian Federation, as well as other CIS countries (Community of Independent States).
Putin also resumed a call to the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council to hold a summit to address challenges, including global security and the pandemic.