Russian President Vladimir Putin today paid tribute to Soviet soldiers who liberated the Auschwitz concentration camps, built by the Nazis in Poland during World War II and liberated 80 years ago.
"We will always remember that it was the Soviet soldier who crushed this terrible and total evil, winning the victory whose greatness will forever remain in world history," Putin said in a message published by the Kremlin.
The Russian president will not attend ceremonies in Poland marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camps by Soviet soldiers.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is a date of "great moral importance," Putin said in a message released by the Kremlin.
"Russian citizens are direct descendants and successors of the generation of victors," the Russian leader said.
The Russian head of state assured that his country opposes "attempts to rewrite the legal and moral judgment that was pronounced against the Nazi executioners and their accomplices."
"We will do everything to defend the right of peoples to ethnic, linguistic and spiritual identity, and to prevent the spread of anti-Semitism, Russophobia and other racist ideologies," Vladimir Putin insisted.
Russian authorities present the conflict in Ukraine as an existential war, in the same sense as that waged by the USSR against Nazi Germany.
Vladimir Putin, for example, justified his offensive in Ukraine in February 2022 by the need to "denazify" this former Soviet republic. The memory of the Second World War is thus highlighted with the aim of exalting the patriotic and military values of their country.
In Poland, some 60 leaders and other international representatives will gather today to celebrate the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camps, but Vladimir Putin will be one of the notable absentees.
British King Charles III and French President Emmanuel Macron are expected to attend, as are German Chancellor and President Olaf Scholz and Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has already announced that he is in Poland to participate in the ceremonies.
Russia had already been absent from ceremonies marking the 80th anniversary of the landings in France in June 2024.
The USSR, allied with Great Britain and the United States against Nazi Germany, suffered the greatest human losses of the Second World War, with at least 20 million dead.
It is estimated that 1.1 million people lost their lives at Auschwitz, the majority of them Jews. In total, it is estimated that around six million Jews were killed during World War II by the Nazis.
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