Moscow will fight all attempts to distort history, the Russian ambassador to Washington Anatoly Antonov has declared, in response to a claim by US President Joe Biden that the US was responsible for winning the Second World War.
Biden visited Arlington Cemetery in the capital to pay respects to fallen US troops on Memorial Day and to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The president told the gathering that the servicemen who are buried at the cemetery had fought in “every major conflict in history” and, among other things, managed to “defeat fascism.” On June 6, 1944, the US soldiers “took to the beaches of Normandy and liberated a continent and literally saved the world,” he claimed.
The president’s remarks are part of a campaign by Washington, Ambassador Antonov wrote on Telegram on Monday, which is aimed at “cynical belittlement and even disavowal of the decisive role of the Soviet Union in crushing the fascists” during that conflict, which in Russia is called the Great Patriotic War (June 1941-May 1945).
“There is not a single country in the world that has endured more than we have in the struggle against Nazi Germany and its satellites. Almost all of Europe fought against the Red Army on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War. These facts cannot be disputed,” he said.
According to the ambassador, the claims by Biden and other US politicians are dictated by the current state of relations between Washington and Moscow. “Such misinformation is part of psychological warfare against Russia. We will fight against it and will not allow the distortion of history,” the envoy promised.
“We will not let the world forget that our people sacrificed 27 million lives [in the fight against the Nazis]. It was Soviet soldiers who hoisted the Victory Banner atop the Reichstag in Berlin,” Antonov pointed out.
Russia’s foreign ministry also commented on Biden’s claim in a statement on Monday, saying that it “would have been strange to expect that those who finance the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev and supply it with weapons, would feel gratitude to the peoples of the Soviet Union for the victory over Nazism.” By promoting “American exceptionalism,” Washington is actually committing “a betrayal of its own anti-fascist past,” it said.
Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, who is now the deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, told TASS on Tuesday that the statement by 81-year-old Biden about the US winning the Second World War is “not senile dementia, but a conscious line towards rewriting history. It is a part of a campaign against our country.”