(Saint Petersburg) President Vladimir Putin promised on Saturday to “do everything” to “eradicate Nazism definitively”, on the occasion of celebrations marking 80 years since the end of the terrible siege of Leningrad, present-day Saint Petersburg , by the German army during the Second World War.
“The siege of Leningrad was unprecedented in the scale of its cruelty and cynicism,” said Mr. Putin, during the inauguration of a memorial to the victims of this siege which lasted 872 days between 1941 and 1944 and had seen more than 800,000 people in Leningrad succumb to famine, disease and bombs.
“It has been eight decades since our grief for these terrible victims, for these broken destinies, has weakened,” he stressed.
“We will do everything to put an end to and definitively eradicate Nazism,” promised the Russian leader, alongside his Belarusian counterpart, Alexander Lukashenko, who also came to attend the ceremony.
The inauguration of this memorial, which notably includes a huge statue of a Motherland with her children, comes less than a month from the second anniversary of the launch of a Russian offensive in Ukraine, launched according to the Kremlin to “demilitarize” and “denazify” this former Soviet republic led, according to Mr. Putin, by neo-Nazis.
PHOTO VYACHESLAV PROKOFYEV, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Vladimir Putin lays a wreath during the ceremony commemorating the siege of Leningrad.
The Kremlin regularly insists that the conflict is a continuation of the Second World War.
“The Kyiv regime continues to glorify Hitler’s accomplices […] and to resort to terror against all those who do not please him,” Mr. Putin again accused on Saturday.
The Russian president regularly recalls that he was personally affected by the siege of Leningrad, one of the worst massacres of the Second World War.
Aged 71, originally from Saint Petersburg, he was not born during the blockade, but his older brother died there. His mother nearly died of starvation during the siege, while his father, who was fighting in the Red Army, was wounded nearby.
Certain buildings in Saint Petersburg still bear warnings from Soviet power against air raids, in a city of 5 million inhabitants whose collective unconscious remains deeply marked by the siege.
The memory of the Great Patriotic War, the name given in Russia to the armed conflict between the USSR and Nazi Germany, remains the source of immense pride in the country and constitutes an essential pillar of the militarist patriotism advocated by the Kremlin.