MOSCOW, May 5. /TASS/. The chair of the State Duma’s committee on culture, Yelena Yampolskaya, First Deputy Speaker Alexander Zhukov and Senator Alexey Pushkov have submitted to the State Duma (parliament's lower house) a bill banning any public move equating the purposes and actions of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany during World War II. The bill was uploaded to the State Duma’s electronic data base on Wednesday.

"In any public statement, publicly demonstrated content, mass media or information and telecommunication networks, including the Internet, it is prohibited to equate the purposes, decisions and actions by the leadership of the USSR, the command and military personnel of the USSR and the decisions and actions of the leadership of Nazi Germany, the command and military personnel of Nazi Germany and countries of the ‘Axis’, as well as to deny the decisive role of the Soviet people in defeating Nazi Germany or the humanitarian mission of the USSR in liberating the countries of Europe," the bill runs. The amendments are to be introduced to the law On the Commemoration of the Soviet People’s Victory in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.

The bill was drafted on the basis of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s instruction issued after a meeting of the presidential council on culture and the arts, which took place on October 27, 2020.

The authors of the initiative stress the impermissibility of mixing up or likening the accomplishments of "defenders of the Motherland, those who gave their lives in the struggle for its freedom and liberation, and actions by the liberator soldiers, on the one hand, and actions by soldiers of the force of occupation and persons found guilty on criminal charges in accordance with the verdict of the Nuremberg Tribunal." The accompanying memorandum says that the purpose of this initiative is to put a legal obstruction in the way of such attempts, "while preserving room for historical research and scholarly discussions, including those concerning concrete actions by concrete persons."

Earlier, the bill’s co-author Yelena Yampolskaya expressed the hope that the law might be passed before the State Duma rises for the summer.