Some nations in Europe that colluded with Adolf Hitler and applauded his anti-Semitic crusade, now demolish Soviet war memorials and seek to equate the USSR with Nazi Germany, the Russian president noted, during a formal speech.

Vladimir Putin recalled the vicious developments that preceded the Second World War, in an address to the Defense Ministry board on Tuesday, telling his audience there was one particular fact in the archive files that touched him the most. Back in 1938, Adolf Hitler hosted the Polish Ambassador to Germany Jozef Lipski and shared with him a plan to send European Jews to Africa where they would surely perish, Putin said.

“The Ambassador in Poland replied, and then wrote it down in his cable to the Polish Foreign Minister: ‘I told Hitler that, if he does, we will erect a magnificent monument to him in Warsaw’,” the President quoted from the archive data, before turning somewhat emotional.

He was a bastard, an anti-Semitic pig, there’s no other way of saying it. He fully agreed with Hitler in his anti-Semitic sentiments and, moreover, promised him he’d erect a monument in Warsaw to his abuse of the Jewish people.

Putin’s words were aimed at a bizarre resolution by the European Parliament, which claimed that the 1939 non-aggression treaty between the USSR and Nazi Germany – known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by the names of Soviet and German Foreign Ministers – had “paved the way for the outbreak of the Second World War.”

But to Putin, signing a pact with Hitler was choosing between bad and worse, namely, the Soviet Union having less time to prepare for the German offensive. Meanwhile, other European nations did not behave any better, he reminded.

Starting from 1938, when Hitler lodged his claims to a part of Czechoslovakia, Great Britain and France surrendered their ally, although [Prague] had a mutual assistance agreement with France, and provided Hitler with the opportunity to seize [the German-inhabited regions of the country].

A year later, the Third Reich invaded Poland, the Eastern European country that had actually “colluded” with Hitler before the war, as historical records tell.

“It is these people who negotiated with Hitler back in the day, it is this sort of people that demolish monuments commemorating Red Army soldiers, who liberated European countries and peoples from the Nazis,” the President concluded. “They are their followers.”

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