During a recent visit to St Petersburg, Russian president Vladimir Putin reiterated his confidence in his country’s victory over Ukraine. Visiting a defence contractor, he also took the opportunity to reassure workers that his so-called “special military operation” was in defence of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine against a “neo-Nazi regime” in Kyiv. In other words, Russia is acting in the tradition of the “great patriotic war” that saved Europe from Nazi Germany.
At a press conference in Moscow meanwhile, Putin’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, spoke along similar lines:
Like Napoleon, who mobilised nearly all of Europe against the Russian empire, and Hitler, who occupied the majority of European countries and hurled them at the Soviet Union, the United States has created a coalition of nearly all European member states of Nato and the EU and is using Ukraine to wage a proxy war against Russia with the old aim of finally solving the ‘Russian question’, like Hitler, who sought a final solution to the ‘Jewish question’.
