Putin Needles Ukraine as He Shuns Wartime Allies at Auschwitz

[thundley4]

Purveyor (21,951 posts)  Tue Jan 27, 2015, 12:59 PM

Putin Needles Ukraine as He Shuns Wartime Allies at Auschwitz

By Aliaksandr Kudrytski and Stepan Kravchenko Jan 27, 2015 12:28 PM ET

As European leaders and U.S. representatives gathered in Poland to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp by the Soviet Red Army, Russian President Vladimir Putin skipped the ceremony to visit the Jewish Museum in Moscow.

“The Russian people bore the main burden of the fight against Nazism on their shoulders,” Putin said Tuesday in a speech at the Jewish Museum and Center of Tolerance in Moscow that included an historical dig at Ukraine.

The president, who attended a similar ceremony in Poland 10 years ago, didn’t receive an official invitation this time and couldn’t go because of his schedule, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said by phone Jan. 13. Organizers of the commemoration, which include the International Auschwitz Council, have said they didn’t send out formal invitations, and instead notified the countries that, like Russia, help fund the site.

The ceremony’s host, Poland, has been calling for tougher European Union sanctions in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea last March and alleged support of separatists in eastern Ukraine. The crisis has plunged relations between Russia and its former World War II allies to their lowest point since the end of the Soviet era. Russia and Ukraine, which fought together in the Soviet Union against the Nazis, accuse each other of responsibility for the conflict in eastern Ukraine, which has cost more than 5,000 lives since April, according to the United Nations.

Memory, Archives

In his speech marking Holocaust Memorial Day, Putin said supporters of wartime Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera were among Nazi collaborators who contributed to the deaths of Jews in Ukraine in World War II. The day also marks the anniversary of the breaking of the siege of Leningrad, Putin’s native city, now St. Petersburg, in 1944 and its liberation from the Nazis’ “criminal slaughter” of civilians, the president said.   

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026143666

PragmaticLiberal (574 posts)
6. Anti-Jewish, anti-gay, anti-black etc etc

Star Member Purveyor (21,951 posts)
8. Hell, you could be talking about Saudi Arabia that our gov't is currently slobbering

all over due to the death of a 'King'...

Of course that is a 'horse of a different color' now isn't it?

  Not my mole. 

malaise (126,603 posts)
11. Amazing the way he was snubbed by Europe given the fact that

it was the Soviets who liberated the poor victims of Auschwitz

malaise loves some commie dicktators.

[HawkHogan]

Russia wasn't liberating anything until the USA got involved.

[franksolich]

Face it; no matter what Putin does, or doesn't do, the primitives are going to hate him, and for one reason only.

Wills, the William769 primitive, did one fine bang-up lobbying job among the primitives, convincing them that he's anti-gay.  That's all it takes; he could be St. Francis of Assisi and Santa Claus at the same time, but because he's ostensibly anti-gay, that wouldn't matter.

[Mary Ann]

I'm surprised Jughead didn't go; after all, his grandfather helped to liberate Auschwitz. 

[DumbAss Tanker]

While the Russians (Actually, the Soviets, a federation of which the Russians were biggest member) suffered truly titanic losses, an awfully high proportion of those losses were directly attributable to Soviet leadership.  They also couldn't have given a rat's ass less about liberating the concentration camps, that was entirely a by-product of pummeling the Germans and their allies while trying to grab as much of Eastern Europe as possible in the process. 

[Carl]

While the Russians (Actually, the Soviets, a federation of which the Russians were biggest member) suffered truly titanic losses, an awfully high proportion of those losses were directly attributable to Soviet leadership.  They also couldn't have given a rat's ass less about liberating the concentration camps, that was entirely a by-product of pummeling the Germans and their allies while trying to grab as much of Eastern Europe as possible in the process.

Thanks to FDR at Yalta or was that later?

[JohnnyReb]

While the Russians (Actually, the Soviets, a federation of which the Russians were biggest member) suffered truly titanic losses, an awfully high proportion of those losses were directly attributable to Soviet leadership.  They also couldn't have given a rat's ass less about liberating the concentration camps, that was entirely a by-product of pummeling the Germans and their allies while trying to grab as much of Eastern Europe as possible in the process.

The Russians initially split Poland with Hitler. Then they killed off the Polish officer corps. Then later, after the Germans had pushed them out of their share and to add insult to injury while retaking it from the Germans, they held up outside of Warsaw for an extended period of time waiting for the Germans to kill off the freedom/democracy loving partisans that were fighting in the city.....and DUmmies can't understand the Polish disdain for communism.

[jukin]

I'm surprised Jughead didn't go; after all, his grandfather helped to liberate Auschwitz. 

Beat me too that.

Fun Fact: Auschwitz was the only concentration camp that spoke Austrian.

[DumbAss Tanker]

Although FDR's inner circle was saturated with Reds that adored the USSR, the Western Allies were in no position to enforce any demands on the Soviets about territory the Red Army occupied.  Once the German 1943 offensives failed to gain decisive results and the Soviet 1944 offensives broke Army Group Center, any discussions about the fate of the East between the Big Three were a pure formality and of only propaganda significance.  Stalin was going to do as he wanted with any territory occupied exclusively by the Red Army when the shooting stopped.

But two big and entirely-avoidable disasters out of the Big Three negotiations were agreeing to forcibly repatriate all the non-German nationalists who had fought against Stalin (Along with their families) to the tender care of the Soviets, and the ultimately-disastrous and wholly-unnecessary agreement to have the USSR declare war on Japan 60 days after V/E day.