In an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson, Russian President Vladimir Putin actually justified the actions of the Nazis, saying that Poland itself provoked Hitler to start World War II. Putin devoted a significant part of the conversation to his vision of history, in which he traditionally justified aggression against Ukraine by the fact that such a state never existed.
“We did not want to attack, but we were forced,” Putin stated after the invasion of Ukraine. Almost word for word, Hitler said the same thing in his speech to the Reichstag after the attack on Poland on September 1, 1939: “The Polish state has refused to peaceful settlement and has appealed to arms. In order to put an end to this lunacy, I have no other choice than to meet force with force from now on.”
As with the aggression in Ukraine, Putin also justified Nazi Germany’s 1939 attack on Poland by accusing the Poles of “collaborating with Hitler.” In addition, according to Putin, World War II began because of the intractability of the Poles. Allegedly, by refusing to cede the territory of Poland called the Danzig Corridor (the Polish Corridor) to Hitler, Warsaw went too far, pushing the Fuhrer to start hostilities.
Note that in September 1939, it was Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that attacked Poland under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed between both states.
“Putin’s words that he is not planning an attack on Poland mean that the dictator “already has at least several plans for a “Polish attack” on Russia in his drawer,” the Polish columnist Piotr Beniuszys wrote in response to the Russian president’s attacks.
Germany, during the reign of the Nazis, carried out the annexation of an independent Austria (Anschluss). In addition, the occupation of the Sudetenland was carried out under the auspices of protecting the German population living there.
Putin often repeats Hitler’s actions and even postulates. The Russian Federation did not come up with new mechanisms, and carried out the annexation of Crimea and the occupation of Donbas under the same far-fetched pretext that Hitler had previously used.
In addition to Ukraine, Russian troops also carried out the occupation of part of the territories of two independent states — Moldova and Georgia. As a result, the self-proclaimed unrecognized Transnistria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia emerged.
Russian propagandists have not known any better than offering a new fascist symbol, essentially a new swastika, for the patriotic upsurge of the masses. And the letter was taken not from the Cyrillic alphabet, but from the Latin alphabet. Z – a new Russian madness is associated with this letter.
Representatives of the Russian government, like the Nazis of the Third Reich, love symbols, but do they realize that they are acting the same way as Hitler in 1941-1944? The Z symbol was used at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Station Z was the name of the building where the Nazis massacred prisoners. In 1943, a gas chamber also began operating here.
One of the justifications for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in Russia is called “denazification.” The Russian leadership everywhere applies the label of “Nazism” not only to Ukraine, but also to the Baltic countries, Poland and even Israel. Last May, in an interview with the Italian TV Rete4, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called Jews “the most ardent anti-Semites” and compared Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskyy to German dictator Adolf Hitler, who, according to Lavrov, also had Jewish roots.
Thus, today’s Russia openly justifies Nazism and Hitler’s actions. At the same time, it tries to blame other countries for the spread of neo-Nazism. It is possible that with such statements, the Russian authorities are already preparing a pretext for further aggression against sovereign European states.