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United Russia condemns Kiev’s plans to remove Great Patriotic War mentions from textbooks

The arguments of the Ukrainian government are becoming more and more reckless, a deputy chairman of the International Committee of the Russian State Duma Ivan Kvitka said

MOSCOW, November 25. /TASS/. Russia’s ruling United Russia party has condemned Ukraine’s plans to remove any mention of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 from history textbooks.

These plans were announced on Tuesday by Volodymyr Vyatovich, director of the Ukrainian National Memory Institute. All after-effects of “the Soviet-era propaganda and primarily a myth about the Great Patriotic War” should be dropped from educational materials and textbooks, he said. “For us, the Second World War started on September 1, 1939, and we have no right to narrow it to the Great Patriotic War, as it was much more horrible and tragic.”

The arguments of the Ukrainian government are becoming more and more reckless, Ivan Kvitka, a deputy chairman of the International Committee of the Russian State Duma lower parliament house, said on Tuesday. “They have already denied their Soviet past. Now they are denying the feat of their fathers and grandfathers. I don’t think attempts to deny their own roots could bring Ukraine closer to Europe,” he said.

He said this initiative of the Kiev authorities was a manifestation of disrespect to the people who had given their lives to defend Ukraine. “As of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, Ukraine had a population of about 41 million, whereas by the end of the war there were only 27 million people living in Ukraine,” Kvitka said. “More than ten million Ukrainians died defending their families, their homeland from fascism. And Kiev wants its citizens to forget about this irreplaceable loss. No wonder the Nazi ideology is flourishing in the present-day Ukraine on such background."