The claims have been contested by the Ukrainian government and the country’s Jewish community.
The Soviet Union’s victory over Hitler’s army – long a symbol of patriotic pride for Russians – has taken centre stage since the beginning of the military intervention.
“POLITICAL GAMES”
Putin said that “attempts to revise the contributions of our country to the Great Victory (against Hitler) actually equate to justifying the crimes of Nazism and open the way for the revival of its deadly ideology”.
Friday is the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp built by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland – a date that has become Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The Auschwitz museum did not invite Russian representatives to the ceremony marking the day the Soviet Red Army liberated the Nazi camp because of the offensive in Ukraine.
“Russia will need an extremely long time and very deep self-examination after this conflict in order to return to gatherings of the civilised world,” Piotr Sawicki, a spokesman for the museum at the site of the former camp, told AFP.
Russia’s Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar told AFP that “for us, this is clearly a humiliation because we perfectly know and remember the role of the Red Army in the liberation of Auschwitz and in the victory over Nazism”.
“These political games have no place on Holocaust day,” Lazar added.
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