Russian President Vladimir Putin pledged on Saturday to do “everything in his power” to “completely eliminate Nazism” on the occasion of the celebration of the eightieth anniversary of the end of the siege imposed by the German army on the city of Leningrad during World War II.
During the inauguration of a memorial to the victims of this siege, which lasted 872 days between 1941 and 1944 and claimed more than 800,000 people, due to famine, epidemics, and bombing, Putin said, “The siege of Leningrad was unprecedentedly cruel.”
He added, “For eight decades, our grief for these victims and these broken destinies has not diminished.”
The Russian President, accompanied by his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko, who attended the celebration, pledged, saying, “We will do everything in our power to eliminate Nazism once and for all.”
The Russian president has long indicated that he was personally affected by the Siege of Leningrad, one of the worst massacres of World War II.
Vladimir Putin (71 years old) was not born during the siege, but his older brother died during it.
Putin's mother nearly starved to death during the siege while his father, who was fighting in the Red Army, was wounded near Leningrad.
Some buildings in St. Petersburg still bear warnings from the Soviet authorities on that day about air raids in a city of five million people whose memories are haunted by the effects of this tragedy.
The anniversary of the “Great Patriotic War”, the name given in Russia to the armed conflict between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, is a source of enormous pride in the country.
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