Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s interview for No Statute of Limitations project, Moscow, June 1, 2024

Question: Massive efforts are underway to investigate Nazi crimes against civilians during the Great Patriotic War. How important is it to perpetuate the memory of the civilians who died during the war?

Sergey Lavrov: I think it is absolutely invaluable. President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stated that preserving historical memory is more than just a tribute to the sacrifices that our people and country made for the sake of our independence, but also guarantees our sovereignty and independence in the future.

It’s impossible to be a nation without historical memory, which fact the history of our country has proved many times. The great victories of our predecessors date back to Kievan Rus, and the Napoleonic wars, the wars of the 19th century, the Crimean War and other military campaigns aimed primarily to weaken Russia. It all ended in defeating Nazi Germany in World War II and creating the United Nations based on eternal vows to make sure nothing like that ever happens again.

The Nuremberg Tribunal appeared to have put an end to the arguments about who was right and who was at fault, who fought for a just cause and who fought for global domination using absolutely inhuman methods.

Unfortunately, we are witnessing the attempts to “realise” history, to rewrite it, and to equate those who defeated Nazism to the Nazi hordes which fact is particularly salient in the case of Ukraine. That is why we find important the efforts to create awareness carried out by public organisations, the Foreign Ministry and other agencies, as well as the Ministry of Culture, the Russian Historical Society, the Russian Military History Society, and our scouts who every year discover burial sites of the victims who died by the hand of Hitler’s criminals in different parts of our country and often beyond its borders. There are people in Europe who help us establish the accurate number of victims to make sure no one is forgotten, and nothing is forgotten. This is one of the most important objectives facing our country and our diplomacy.

Question: This process is unfolding quite strongly in our country and Belarus, and a little less so in Europe. However, some people think it’s time to stop fussing over this victory, since many years have passed since then and we should leave those “Nazi old-timers” be, not call then by their names, since they have all died or are about to. They say let’s forget about it, there’s no need to bring it up all the time. What would you tell them?

Sergey Lavrov: This represents an attempt to revive Nazism in new generations that is poorly disguised as kindliness of heart. The Germans used roughly the same words that you used in your question to send a message to us during the talks, including talks with the Foreign Ministry. This concerned different issues, be it European security or bilateral relations with Germany, long before the special military operation began.

We faced numerous issues that our German “colleagues” outright refused to discuss, including payments to survivors of the Siege of Leningrad. In July 2008, the Germans decided to make lump-sum payments to siege survivors of Jewish descent only. We contacted them and said that justice must prevail. All siege survivors had similar amounts of suffering to endure. They all experienced sub-zero chills and died. It was a harrowing part of the Great Patriotic War, or World War II. We were told that Holocaust victims can and should be compensated according to the law, while other people are not victims of the Holocaust. Clearly, this came across as a cynical remark. I discussed this with President of Germany Frank-Walter Steinmeier when he was Foreign Minister of the Federal Republic of Germany. I spoke with other officials from the Ministry. We reached out to other agencies as well, but to no avail.

The Germans said they could build a small hospital in St Petersburg for siege survivors and make arrangements for a place where the young people could meet with them. We did not object to that even though we let them know that siege survivors who are not eligible to payments because of their ethnic background live not only in St Petersburg and other Russian cities, but outside Russia as well. Many of them live in Europe. These arguments had no effect on them. Under the executive order issued by President Putin on September 17, 2021, we made lump sum payments to siege survivors. The meeting house and hospital have not been built yet.

I brought this up because during our conversations on similar subjects Germans have long been suggesting the idea you mentioned in your question. They say it’s a matter of the past, and Germany has settled accounts with everyone, paid reparations and apologised on many occasions. Modern Germans believe they owe nothing to anyone and suggested that we subscribe to this line of thinking, too. It’s a bad topic. Not because we want to hear the Germans repent incessantly, no. We want them to be part of the normal life of all the countries around the world, and we want Nazism to never again rear its head on anyone’s soil. But this stance smacks of arrogance. Arrogance is always a sign of a nation’s ability to suddenly feel exceptional. And on it goes from there, as it happened many times in history.

Question: As we can see, this topic has remained highly relevant. Nazism grew not so far from here in Ukraine. How was it possible, since we speak the same language and share the same history? Given our country’s ideology, today’s challenges overlap with the challenges of the Great Patriotic War.

Sergey Lavrov: The revival of Nazism was most clearly seen in Ukraine, but it started much earlier after the Baltic States joined the EU and NATO. In response to our concerns that they were trying to quickly pull them in, we were assured that once they were admitted to the EU and NATO their Russophobic sentiment would vanish. Allegedly, they acted badly because they are afraid of us, since we “occupied” them. Nothing has changed, quite the opposite. If we look at the current situation in NATO and EU, the Baltic nations, the Poles and the Czechs are part of the most aggressive group in the European organisations. These countries initiate the most Russophobic approaches and actions of the EU and NATO. Soon after they were admitted into the “civilised” European family, they started staging demonstrations and torchlight processions to honour the Nazis from the Waffen-SS. The surviving members of that criminal organisation proudly marched along the streets of the capitals with the approval of the authorities.

The talk about the excessive number of the monuments and the lack of reason to put these monuments in central parts of the cities began back then. In 2017, the infamous epic with the Bronze Soldier monument, as well as other events, began to unfold which was long before the special military operation began and even before the coup in Ukraine. This coup was carried out by the people who professed ultra-nationalist views and were hungry for power. The first thing those who, in violation of the Agreement on Settling the Political Crisis in Ukraine to hold early elections, which was signed and guaranteed by Germany, France and Poland, did was trample this document underfoot the next morning and declare that the Russian language was no longer an official language in Ukraine. One of the putschists, future Prime Minister of Ukraine Arseny Yatsenyuk, addressed the Maidan protesters saying they had formed a government of victors. Meanwhile, the document that was guaranteed by the Europeans and they tore apart talked about the creation of a government of national unity to prepare early elections.

The third factor was Dmitry Yarosh’s statement on behalf of the Right Sector and everyone else behind this coup that the Russians must “clear out” from Crimea and that this was supposedly an absolutely inevitable outcome, because Russians would never think like Ukrainians and would never honour their heroes. After that, the “friendship trains” were sent out to assault the Supreme Council of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, which caused a strong outcry on the part of the people of Crimea and southeastern Ukraine, who did not want to live in a country taken over by Nazis. Since then, the worship of Roman Shukhevich and Stepan Bandera went into high gear.

One of the first decisions of Poroshenko’s government was to change Soviet and even tsarist geographical toponyms to commemorate those who were recognised as criminals by the Nuremberg Tribunal. Torch processions were a regular occurrence. Right Sector did not hide its claims to be the heir of the SS traditions, whose insignia were worn by members of the Ukrainian armed forces. Concurrently, they started using outright racist methods of liquidating the Russian language.

Reichskommissar Erich Koch wrote in his memoirs in 1942 that “Ukraine is for us only an object of exploitation, and that it must pay the expenses of the war, and that in a certain way the population must, as a second rate people, be utilized for the tasks of the war, even if they have to be caught with a lasso.” He presciently described how the people of Ukraine are being caught for service in the Ukrainian forces now to play up to the illusions and ambitions of the Nazi regime. Russia’s Investigative Committee has long ago initiated a criminal case under Article 357 of the Criminal Code “Genocide”, accusing those who were on the side of Nazi Germany and committed war crimes on the territory of the Soviet Union, of being guilty of genocide of all Soviet peoples. There are reasons to believe that this was a conscious move on the part of the Germans. More than half of over 27 million people who died in that war were civilians which fact reveals the nature of the regime and its soldiers, which our country had to face.

The extermination of the Russian people and other ethnic groups that made up the people of the Soviet Union is not a thing of the past. If you read the official statements by the Ukrainian leaders, such as the putschists who seized power in February 2014, who said that “Russians must clear out from Crimea because they will never think like us, live like us, pray like us.” In November 2021, long before the special military operation began, Ukrainian President Zelensky said the same thing when he was asked what he thought about the people of Donbass. He said, “there are humans and there are species.” On an even earlier occasion, in August 2021, he said that if you live in Ukraine and feel like being a part of Russian culture, then leave for Russia for the good of your children and grandchildren. This is nothing short of racism and Nazism.

If you read what Zelensky’s official team, the Security Council secretary, the head of his Office, and the adviser to the head of the Office, and other officials had to say, you’ll hear them say “rusnya” quite often and that there should be nothing Russian in Kharkov or Nikolayev. They also claim they will continue to pass laws that will legally exterminate everything about Russia and do so physically, if necessary. This is a known fact.

Not a single law banning the Russian language, media and culture, and not a single statement to that effect has elicited any response in the West despite our unending requests for the OSCE, the Council of Europe, and the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to initiate special investigations. They tend to conduct them every time they have a significant or notable reason, but only when Russia is involved. Duplicity and connivance with regard to their underlings, forgiving them anything and everything, including these blatant actions to introduce Nazi theory and practices, have become commonplace only because these people suit the West and the United States as a tool to oppose the Russian Federation.

Question: Hopefully history will have new outcomes to offer. It’s good to know that these crimes have no statute of limitations.

Sergey Lavrov: They should never have them, and we stand by this approach. Almost 20 years ago, Russia submitted a resolution to the General Assembly on combatting the glorification of Nazism. It was adopted with a few abstentions, mostly by the European countries. The United States voted against it from the start saying its Constitution has the “freedom of speech” clause enshrined in it, which is why it would oppose the adoption of such approaches in the modern-day UN activities. On the night before the special military operation began, President Vladimir Putin once again went over the reasons of why we were left with no other choice which included the West’s unwavering policy of using Ukraine to create direct military threats to Russia’s security on our borders.

The second most important area of our efforts was to prevent Ukraine from turning into a Nazi state which it was on the way of becoming, which is why denazification was among our objectives. Numerous laws have been passed, and anti-fascists in Ukraine saw many crackdowns on them, including political assassinations. Books in Russian have been thrown out from the libraries. Unlike Nazis, enterprising Ukrainians did not burn them, but turned them in as waste paper in exchange for the money. This is a known fact. The West failed to respond to these egregious developments.

Sadly, after the special military operation against Nazism started in Ukraine, European countries - Germany, Japan and Italy - that abstained during the General Assembly voting on the resolution against the glorification of Nazism started voting against it. These are the countries that repented before they were admitted to the UN and vowed to never again go down that path. After all, Nazism is rearing its ugly head.

Think back to Italy’s decision, which was preceded by a public debate about whether the people of that country could do the Nazi salute. They seriously debated it. They decided they could, as long as they did not mean the same thing that Nazis did during WWII. Italy’s government is rather interesting in terms of trying to revivify the traditions.

In addition to the resolution on combatting the glorification of Nazism, the Foreign Ministry, in conjunction with our public organisations, puts together annual reports covering cases of glorifying Nazism as a follow-up to the UN General Assembly resolutions. This theme is also covered in our annual reports on the human rights situation worldwide. This work is of paramount importance. Without preserving historical memory and with the young people not knowing their history, we will be left with the people who know nothing about their past and a society that is unworthy of its great history. We cannot let this happen. President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly emphasised the special importance of the patriotic work. Its goals have become particularly urgent and challenging on the external front.