Updated 01/27/24 at 4:39 p.m
An indirect and not very discreet message to Ukraine, which he has been trying to invade for almost two years. Vladimir Putin was present this Saturday at the celebrations of the 80th anniversary of the end of the siege of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) by the German army during the Second World War and reiterated his desire to “do everything” to “finally eradicate the blockade” . Nazism.”
By stationing his troops on Ukrainian soil, the Kremlin chief had actually declared that he wanted to “demilitarize” and “denazify” this former Soviet republic, which, in his opinion, was run by neo-Nazis. “The Kiev regime continues to glorify Hitler's accomplices […] and to resort to terror against anyone he doesn’t like,” Putin reiterated on Saturday.
Putin speaks of “cruelty” and “cynicism”
71-year-old Vladimir Putin is originally from Saint Petersburg and was not born during the city's siege by the Germans. But his older brother died there, his mother almost starved to death, and his father was injured nearby. The blockade lasted a total of 872 days between 1941 and 1944 and resulted in the deaths of more than 800,000 people. “The siege of Leningrad was unprecedented in the extent of its cruelty and cynicism,” Putin said this Saturday, accompanied by his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko.
They inaugurated a monument in which there is a huge statue of the Motherland with her children. And for good reason: the Great Patriotic War (as the armed conflict between the USSR and Nazi Germany is called in Russia) is one of the pillars of Kremlin propaganda.