At a commemoration held in St. Petersburg, the Russian president announced that tens of thousands of people in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which have significant Russian minorities, are being declared inferior, deprived of their most basic rights and subjected to persecution.

Russian President Vladimir Putin promised the final eradication of Nazism on Saturday, at a commemoration held in St. Petersburg on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the breakthrough of the former Nazi siege ring around Leningrad.

"The siege of Leningrad was unprecedentedly cruel and cynical"

said the Russian president at the inauguration of the memorial to the victims of the 872-day blockade between 1941 and 1944. More than a million civilians died during the siege of Leningrad.

"For eight decades now, our pain has not eased because of the terrible victims, the lives that have been crushed," the president emphasized.

We will do everything we can to eradicate Nazism once and for all”

- emphasized the Russian president, flanked by Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko.

All this happened a few weeks before the second anniversary of the launch of the offensive against Ukraine. The Russian leadership justified the attack with the intention of "liberating the neighboring country from Nazism".

"The Kiev regime continues to glorify Hitler's accomplices, the SS men, and terrorize all those who do not like it"

Putin stated. In his speech, the Russian president accused Europe of being anti-Russian.

"In some European countries, anti-Russian sentiment has been raised to the level of state policy"

he highlighted.

Putin also criticized the Baltic states. He stated that it has a significant Russian minority

In Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, tens of thousands are declared inferior people,

deprive them of their most basic rights and subject them to persecution”.

Vladimir Putin's family was directly affected by the siege of Leningrad; he himself was born in Leningrad in 1952, his brother died during the siege, his mother nearly starved to death, and his father, who fought in the Red Army, was wounded near the city.

(MTI)

Featured image: MTI/AP/RIA Novostyi/Ramil Sitdikov