MOSCOW, December 19. /TASS/. The European Parliament’s decision to equate Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union is unacceptable, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at his annual news conference in Moscow on Thursday.
"I am aware of the European Parliament’s decision and I consider it to be unacceptable and incorrect. One may condemn the Stalin regime and totalitarianism in general, and not without a reason. Undoubtedly, our people had fallen victim to totalitarianism and we have condemned it, as well as Stalin's cult of personality," Putin pointed out. "However, it is the height of cynicism to put the Soviet Union on par with Nazi Germany," Putin added.
According to him, those who made such a decision either don’t know history or can’t read.
"Let them read historical documents so that they can see that the Munich Agreement was signed in 1938: the leaders of key European countries - France and the United Kingdom - signed an agreement with Hitler to divide Czechoslovakia. As for Poland, a diplomat wrote that it had done everything possible to participate in the division of Czechoslovakia, and as for the Soviet Union, it called on all international players to form a united front against Hitler but failing to form such a front, they sought to redirect Hitler’s aggression to the east for they could not understand that Nazi Germany was not focused on relations with Poland but on expanding to the east and waging a war against the Soviet Union," Putin stressed.
He added that he planned to write an article on those developments based on archive documents.
On September 19, the European Parliament passed a resolution "on the 80th anniversary of the start of the Second World War and the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe." The document says that "80 years ago, on August 23, 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a Treaty of Non-Aggression, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and its secret protocols, dividing Europe and the territories of independent states between the two totalitarian regimes and grouping them into spheres of interest, which paved the way for the outbreak of the Second World War." According to the resolution, the "Soviet Union started an aggressive war against Finland," "occupied and annexed parts of Romania," "and annexed the independent republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia." The European Parliament also drew attention "to the continued use of symbols of the Soviet regime in the public sphere and for commercial purposes" and pointed out that "a number of European countries have banned the use of both Nazi and communist symbols."