ST. PETERSBURG, January 18. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin has promised to open a center containing archival documents of the Second World War.
"We will shut the dirty mouths of some public figures from overseas who open theirs to achieve spur-of-the-moment political goals. We will shut them up with factual and fundamental information," Putin vowed at a meeting with veterans and representatives of patriotic organizations in St. Petersburg on Saturday.
The president noted that he would be visiting Israel, which does not permit the Holocaust - the World War II genocide of the Jews - to be forgotten not even for a moment.
Putin recalled that in the coming days he would be visiting Israel to unveil a monument to victims of the Siege of Leningrad.
"I say thank you for this initiative to the Israeli leadership and to all those who initiated this event. It is a good event. It reminds [us] of the victims of the Second World War and of all those who made a significant contribution to the eradication of the Nazis," the president emphasized.
Putin stressed, "Jewish public organizations and Israel’s leadership do a very good job, not letting the world forget about the victims of the Holocaust."
"By the way, among the Holocaust victims were very many Jews from the Soviet Union. And we must not forget about the victims of other ethnic groups of the Soviet Union, and about the Russian people," Putin added, noting that "nearly 70% of the Soviet Union’s losses in the Second World War were documented in the RSFSR [the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic - TASS], which is now modern-day Russia."
In this connection, Putin announced, "we will set up a center of archival documents."
"We will shut the mouths of all those who are trying to distort history, to misrepresent it, to belittle the role of our fathers and grandfathers, of our heroes who laid down their lives defending their Motherland and in fact the whole world from the brown plague," the president said.
The website and the center "will be open both to our citizens and to the entire world."
"We will foil any attempts to present history in an absolutely sinister light. We will shut those filthy mouths forever with those documents, in order to teach them a lesson," he vowed.