Excluding Russia from ceremonies marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp by Soviet troops illustrates what’s wrong with the West, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has said.
Troops of the Red Army’s 332nd Rifle Division reached the death camp, built in southern Poland by Nazi Germany, on January 27, 1945, liberating around 7,000 remaining prisoners.
“Soon you will have the ceremony marking the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp,” Vucic told Serbian media on Wednesday, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session in New York.
“Those who liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Russians, won’t be invited. I presume that those who had the camp built will be invited,” Vucic said. “Everything in this world is, pardon my phrase, perverted and inverted.”
The Auschwitz Museum in Poland has made a point of not inviting Russia to ceremonies since the outbreak of hostilities with Ukraine in 2022. Last year, museum director Piotr Cywinski accused Moscow of a “similar sick megalomania” and “similar lust for power” as the Nazis, drawing a rebuke from Moscow.
“This is the anniversary of liberation,” Cywinski said in a statement earlier this week. “We remember the victims, but we also celebrate freedom. It is hard to imagine the presence of Russia, which clearly does not understand the value of freedom. Such presence would be cynical.”
The Serbian president brought up Cywinski’s gesture in the context of Western leaders repeatedly invoking “territorial integrity and respecting the UN Charter,” but only when it comes to Ukraine.
“When it comes to the Serbs, who cares?” Vucic said. “They don’t care, that’s the point. They can seize Serbian territory and back secession with impunity.”
The US and its allies backed the ethnic Albanian separatists in the Serbian province of Kosovo to declare independence in 2008, and have since pressured Belgrade to recognize this act. Vucic has refused.
The Serbian president lamented that Kosovo Albanians and other groups in the Balkans routinely trample the rights of the Serbs “because they think they can do whatever they want, since they are protected by big Western powers.”
Moscow has accused the US of historical revisionism in recent years, as Washington pushed a narrative that World War II started with a “joint” Nazi and Soviet invasion of Poland, while omitting the Soviet role in defeating the Third Reich and liberating Auschwitz.
It is believed that more than 1.1 million people perished in the complex of death camps near the town of Oswiecim, most of them Jews deported from all over Eastern Europe.