Russian embassy: Comparing Russia to Nazi Germany is unacceptable

THE [Russian] embassy has taken note of the article “Putin: His own worst enemy” (The Manila Times, October 29) by Hermenegildo C. Cruz who is obviously stuck in the paradigm of the Cold War and continues to give assessments of modern Russia based on his background as “a sovietologist.” What is most outrageous and unacceptable is that he allows himself not for the first time to compare the Russian leadership with Hitler. Ridiculous parallels are drawn between the territorial and political expansion of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and the Russian leader nowadays, who allegedly “replicated Hitler’s conduct.” The author replicating himself the tendentious Western narrative does not hesitate to engage in a clear forgery of facts in support of this point of view. He accuses Putin of seizing South Ossetia from Georgia in 2008 and Crimea from Ukraine, intervening in the civil war in Syria and, of course, “invading” Ukraine, presenting to the reader a set of Western propaganda clichés without even trying to explain the essence of the events that took place in these territories and the real role of Russia in them.

I hope no need to remind that the territorial and political expansion of Nazi Germany was aimed at gaining world domination and, associated with this, the maximum expansion of the territory of Germany. The Nazi leadership justified this policy with the goal of gaining “living space” (Lebensraum) for ethnic Germans by depriving the conquered lands of sovereignty, harsh economic exploitation and the destruction of peoples. Any comparison of Nazi Germany with Russia, which sacrificed millions of lives in the fight against fascism, is unacceptable. Its goal is to create an image of the enemy, coming up with any, even the most absurd, reasons for this.

The only thing in which one cannot but agree with Mr. Cruz is that, nevertheless, historical parallels indeed suggest themselves today, but in a slightly different way.

This time global dominance is being claimed by the United States that has subjugated almost all of the collective West and mobilized it in order to make Georgia and Ukraine tools of war against Russia just like, in his time, Hitler called to arms most of the European countries to attack the Soviet Union.

But Georgia did not live up to the Western expectations. On the night of Aug. 7-8, 2008, it treacherously attacked the people of South Ossetia and the Russian peacekeepers stationed there. The calculation of Mikhail Saakashvili’s regime was monstrously cynical. While the whole world watched the opening of the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, the Georgian army, trained to NATO standards, tried to take South Ossetia by blitzkrieg. Only the timely intervention of Russia, which carried out an operation to force Georgia to peace, made it possible for South Ossetia to survive. The Russian Federation not only came to the rescue and saved the people of South Ossetia from destruction, but also recognized the state independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and concluded treaties of friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance with them. In making this decision, the Russian side relied on the provisions of the UN Charter, the Helsinki Final Act, and other fundamental international documents, including the 1970 Declaration on the principles of international law relating to friendly relations between states. It must be emphasized that, in accordance with this Declaration, each state is obliged to refrain from any violent actions that deprive peoples of their right to self-determination, freedom and independence, to observe in their actions the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples and to have governments representing all the people living on this territory. There is no doubt that Mikhail Saakashvili’s regime didn’t meet these high standards set by the world community.

After the failure in Georgia, the same scenario was played out by NATO countries in Ukraine. After the government coup in February 2014 the radical nationalists who seized power in Kyiv have conducted a policy of suppression with regard to Ukraine’s Russians and Russian-speaking population throughout the last eight years. In the meantime, the West was cynically looking the other way as if not noticing the Ukrainian radicals’ actions meant to solve the “problem of Donbass” by force. Moreover, the West was actually encouraging them to implement this scenario intending to place NATO bases there (there was a time when the United States promised not to expand NATO or not to reinforce its security at the expense of others).

To sum up the decisions taken at the referendums in Crimea in 2014 and then the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics as well as Zaporozhye and Kherson regions in September 2022 are just a response to neo-Nazi Ukraine’s atrocities and the fulfillment of the people’s longstanding aspiration to reunite with their historical homeland. Russia is not responding to imaginary threats in distant countries, but is defending its borders and its people from real genocide perpetrated by the descendants and followers of Nazi henchmen, who are now at the service of their overseas masters.

Commenting on the “intervention” in the civil war in Syria, I would like to note that Russia carried out an anti-terrorist operation there at the request of the legally elected leadership of this country. The active phase of the operation ended already in 2017. Then the President of Russia Vladimir Putin instructed the Ministry of Defense to withdraw Russian troops from Syria, and the Minister of Defense Sergey Shoigu reported on the completion of the operation against the Islamic State banned in Russia by “the complete defeat of the terrorists.” The results of the Russia’s “intervention” was the liberation of the 90 percent of the territory of the Syrian Republic from terrorists.

At the same time, I would like to recall in contrast the actions of Washington, which has never hesitated to use force under fabricated pretexts anywhere in the world, using false claims to justify its actions such as the need to protect the lives and well-being of US citizens. Like for example the many years of a bloody war in Vietnam, in which the United States became embroiled after a provocation that they themselves staged in the Gulf of Tonkin. There were also Yugoslavia, which the United States and NATO tried to bomb into democracy, the destroying of Iraq, where weapons of mass destruction were never found, and Libya that was plunged into chaos.

It’s difficult to understand what Mr. Cruz means when he claims that President Putin “is governing without a popular mandate.” The Russian leader is the legally elected president, for whom 76 percent of the country’s population voted. It is naive to draw conclusions that President Putin is not supported by the population only because a small male part rushed abroad, evading the draft. There are enough real men in Russia who, guided by the memory of heroic ancestors and a sense of duty, responded to the call of the Motherland. Within a month, the mobilization plan was completed. On its results, the Russian leader himself spoke out on October 31 this year, declaring its successful completion. At the same time, as it was noted, out of 300,000 conscripts, only 41,000 are currently participating in military actions. The remaining 259,000 are being prepared at the training grounds.

Nina Prakapovich, Press Attaché Embassy of the Russian

Federation