Putin cites Ukraine as example of Western double standards regarding Holocaust

© Mikhail Metzel/TASS



Russia's president Vladimir Putin and Alexander Boroda, general director of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Cente

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned on Tuesday against the policy of double standards, which can be observed during the ongoing military conflict in the south-east of Ukraine.

"We all know well how dangerous and destructive double standards, indifference and apathy to fate of others are," Putin said at an event dedicated to 70th anniversary of liberation by the Red Army of the inmates of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp in Oswiecim /Poland/.

"This is what for instance is happening with present day's tragedy in Ukraine's south-east, where in the course of many months peaceful residents of Donbas, Luрansk and other towns and residential areas are killed in cold blood," Putin said addressing the event, held at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow.

According to the data provided by the United Nations, over 5,000 people were killed and up to 11,000 wounded since mid-April last year as a result of armed clashes between Ukrainian troops and local militias in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions during Kiev's military operation to regain control over the breakaway territories.

The Russian president also said that "it is necessary today, in the 21st century, to increase the level of the collective security, to promote values of humanity and cooperation, and to always remember the lessons of history."

Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was the site where the Nazis annihilated more than a million Jews as well as Polish intellectuals and Soviet prisoners of war. Sources put the overall number of people killed there at between 1.5 million and 2 million, including 15,000 Soviet citizens. More than 200 Soviet soldiers gave their lives to liberate the camp and the nearby town of Oswiecim.

January 27, the day on which the camp was liberated by Soviet troops, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, established by a resolution of the UN Security Council in November, 2005.

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