Residents of Leningrad leaving their houses destroyed in Nazi bombardments, 10 December 1942. Photo: RIA Novosti archive / Boris Kudoyarov
Russia has officially demanded that Germany recognise the siege of Leningrad and “other crimes committed by the Third Reich” against the Soviet Union during the Second World War as genocide, Russian state news agency TASS reported on Monday.
In a diplomatic note quoted by TASS, Russia accused Germany of taking a “dual-track approach” to its history by recognising crimes committed in its colonial era as genocide, but not doing the same for “crimes against the peoples of the Soviet Union committed during World War II”.
Russia called Berlin’s view that the issue had been resolved through reparations after the Second World War “unacceptable and unconvincing”, adding that the “humanitarian gesture” made by Germany in 2019 to fund the modernisation of a St. Petersburg hospital and the building of a German-Russian cultural centre to commemorate the victims of the siege had not been carried out and was nevertheless “not comparable to the scale of the tragedy of Leningrad”.
This year marked the 80th anniversary of the end of the almost 900-day siege of Leningrad, which resulted in the deaths of around 1 million people. Germany officially recognises the siege as a “terrible war crime”.
In January, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko inaugurated a new memorial to the victims of the siege outside St. Petersburg, with Putin using his speech at the ceremony to condemn “Russophobia” across Europe and to accuse the current Ukrainian government of “glorifying Hitler’s followers”.
