Putin defends 'Molotov-Ribbentrop' pact, says Western countries, not USSR, helped Germany st
Putin is trying to rewrite WW2 history. The Russian president Vladimir Putin, rejected Western criticism of the Soviet Union’s pact with Nazi Germany which led to WW2. Speaking during Friday’s meeting with the leaders of other ex-Soviet countries in St. Petersburg, strongly criticized a recent resolution of the European parliament, which blamed the 1939 Soviet-Nazi pact for the outbreak of World War II.
President Putin, instead accused the Western powers of colluding with Adolf Hitler by signing agreements with Germany, most notably the Munich Agreement during which Great Britain, France and Italy allowed Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia in exchange for Hitler promising not to make any further territorial demands.
Putin argued that the 1939 pact followed numerous agreements that Britain, France and Poland signed with the Nazis in a bid to appease Hitler. He insisted that those deals, including the 1938 Munich pact that allowed Hitler to annex Czechoslovakia, encouraged the Nazis and paved way to World War II. “The Soviet Union was the last to sign a nonaggression pact with Hitler,” he said. “They want to shift the blame for unleashing World War II from the Nazis to communists,” he added. He goes on to spew unhinged and ahistorical claims about how Poland was really Nazi Germany's ally working hand in glove in order to help it, adding that in fact it was the Polish government, not Soviet Russia that helped Hitler destroy Poland stating that "...the leaders of those countries, including Poland, at that time, actually threw their people under the chariot of Nazi Germany’s military machine." Putin is actually blaming Poland for... invading Poland. What Putin forgets to mention is that while non aggression agreements were signed by western countries with Nazi Germany, they were not the same as the Molotov Ribbentrop treaty signed by Stalin and Hitler in 1939. The reason being that that it was in fact an "aggression" pact which made Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany allies, and enabled Hitler and Stalin to invade Poland and start WW2, and also enabled Stalin to invade Finland and occupy the Baltic states - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and parts of Romania (Bessarabia).
A video showing Nazi German and Soviet Russian soldiers in Poland in 1939.
Officially the pact was a non aggression pact between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, but a secret protocol hidden from the world told the real story of this pact. The secret protocol divided the territories of Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland into German and Russian "spheres of influence" basicly carving out future central and eastern Europe between Russia and Germany. The pact also extended to the economic sphere, with Germany providing military equipment in exchange for Russian raw materials such as oil, grain, iron and phosphates. Just over a week later after signing the pact, Hitler invaded Poland, and 17 days later the Red Army invaded Poland from the east.
A caricature from 1939 depicting Hitler and Stalin meeting over the corpse of Poland.
The Molotov - Ribbentrop pact, which made Germany and Russia allies untill Germany invaded Russia in 1941, was the main reason for the outbreak of WW2 in Europe, and anyone who views it as a "non aggression pact" is either deluded, brainwashed or just plain ignorant when it comes to WW2 history. This is nothing new, in the last several years there has been a concentrated effort from Putin and the Kremlin to fabricate, if not completely rewrite Russian/Soviet history when it concerns the outbreak of WW2, and to erase the USSR's role in invading Poland in 1939 along with the Nazi Germany, and helping Hitler start WW2.
