Check out the real reason why Russia was not invited to the Auschwitz commemoration. And no, the West has not turned ‘Nazi’. Not so long ago, on 27 January 2025, the world commemorated 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army in 1945. There was no Russian delegation present at the event. Why? Because since Russia’s unprovoked and illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum has refused to invite the aggressor to the annual commemoration, denouncing Russia’s war against Ukraine as a ‘barbaric act.
By EUvsDisinfo | April 25, 2025 —
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The Kremlin and its mouthpieces have, as usual, made up an explanation for Russia’s absence from the Auschwitz commemoration: Western Russophobia and historical revisionism, and the revival of Nazism in the EU and Ukraine. In fact, Moscow has been using the ‘Nazi brush’ throughout the war to smear anyone standing up to Russian imperialism. Lately, Russia has used the same tactic to belittle and ridicule the European Union in the context of negotiating peace in Ukraine.
The Kremlin’s standard talking points about the Holocaust
The Kremlin claims that the West does not respect the contribution of the Soviet Union to the victory over Nazism and is seeking to erase the heroic deeds of Russia. Moscow promotes the illusion that Russia is the only real heir to the USSR and hence the glory of the Red Army is reserved only for the Russians. In truth, the Red Army included military formations from many nationalities annexed or occupied by the Soviet Union.
Notably, about 7 million Ukrainians fought in the Red Army, making up about 50% of the Soviet troops fighting Nazis on the South-Western Front. The killing and destruction was particular intense in the regions of Ukraine with most cities destroyed. So claiming that Russia alone fought against Hitler is not just insulting to the memory of the victims of Nazism, it is blatantly historically false inaccurate.
In the Kremlin’s twisted version of history, the West seeks to erase the historical memory of Holocaust victims by not inviting Russia. Moscow portrays this as an insult to the victims of the Holocaust. The Kremlin tries to claim that by inviting ‘Nazi’ Zelenskyy to the Auschwitz commemoration instead of Russia, Poland committed ‘blasphemy’ and is promoting ‘neo-Nazi ideology’, a false narrative aimed at smearing critics of the Kremlin.
All of these claims are as predictable as they are wrong.
Putin moves the goal posts
Even if the noise level has been high for a long time, Russia has been ramping up its accusatory Nazi rhetoric to a new high. Putin used the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz to move the rhetorical goal posts beyond the Kremlin’s standard talking points.
Putin started out by calling the citizens of Russia the ‘direct descendants of the victorious generation’ that liberated Auschwitz, dismissing the role of non-Russians in the Red Army – including Ukrainians, who made up the majority of the units that liberated Auschwitz.
Putin then pulled out the recurrent disinformation narrative about the alleged revival of ‘Nazi ideology in the West’ by saying that Russia stands against ‘any attempts to alter the legal and moral judgment passed on the Nazis’.
By lumping in non-existent ‘Russophobia’ – an allegedly irrational hatred of all things Russian – with the all too real, hateful ideologies of anti-Semitism and racism, and on Holocaust Remembrance Day no less, Putin tries to portray modern-day Russians as victims of the same evil ‘Nazi West’ that the Jews were victims of during World War II. This is a shameless attempt to weaponise victimhood and has been one of Moscow’s go-to tactics to flip the roles of victim and aggressor, while dismissing responsibility for starting a full-scale war against Ukraine.
Historical revisionism
According to the Kremlin, any discussion about the Holocaust is required to include two elements: (1) a recognition of the Soviet war effort and its staggering losses in WWII, and (2) a denunciation of the ‘neo-Nazi regime’ in Kyiv. Whoever disagrees with this manipulative take will be accused of ‘historical revisionism’ and trying to ‘whitewash the Nazis’.
In January, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova, known for her bombastic statements, made a series of loud statements commenting on the refusal of the Auschwitz Museum to invite a Russian delegation for the 80th year commemoration of the camp’s liberation. She pushed key pro-Kremlin narratives to deflect from the real reasons Russia wasn’t invited to the event and this predictably included accusing Kyiv and anyone who supports Ukraine of being ‘Nazis’.
Zakharova claimed that Europeans had allegedly insulted the memory of both the fallen Red Army heroes and Holocaust victims. This was not ‘just about Russophobia’, she said, but a ‘monstrous version of the same segregation that led to Nazism and fascism, only in a modern, beautiful wrapping’.
In subsequent statements, Zakharova falsely claimed that the ‘West had erased the memory about the Holocaust victims in one second’. However, a quick scan of the international media illustrate the opposite: the 80-years commemoration made it into news reporting in a multitude of media around the world thus enforcing that memory.
Invent a lie, repeat it and let it spread
Zakharova repeated the false claim that the Chief Rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich, had called Zelenskyy a ‘dictator who has tamed Nazis on a leash’. This piece of totally fabricated and manipulative content initially appeared on several ‘patriotic’ Russian Telegram channels and after Zakharova’s statement, mainstream Kremlin outlets amplified it and beamed it to a broad audience in most world languages. This mechanism of spreading disinformation follows the pattern we have identified in our 3rd Report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) Threats.
Questioning the meaning of the Holocaust
The Kremlin’s distortion and disinformation did not stop there. According to pro-Kremlin propagandist Sergey Markov, ‘the Europeans had organised a Holocaust of Jews and a genocide of the Russians – all European nations actively assisted the Germans’; the current format of the Auschwitz commemoration ‘shows that Europe is morally ready to organise a new genocide’.
This narrative builds on the Kremlin’s ideological concept, introduced in 2020, of an alleged ‘genocide of the Soviet people’, which presents the ‘Soviet people’ as the main victim of Nazi crimes and Russia as the true successor to the Soviet Union. In this context, Moscow began demanding that Germany recognize Nazi mass murders of Soviet citizens, such as the siege of Leningrad, as genocide.
At the same time, the Kremlin started to question the Holocaust’s significance as a genocide of European Jews, demanding that it not be ‘reduced to a description of Nazi atrocities against the Jewish people exclusively’ but rather seen as part of a much larger ‘genocide of the Soviet people’.
The Kremlin’s ideological goals
This clearly shows that the Kremlin wants to exploit the Holocaust for its own ideological goals, fabricating the narrative that the Russian people are facing the same threats today as during WWII, when the ‘evil Nazi West’ carried out a ‘genocide’ against Russians. According to this narrative, the West, and especially EU, has supposedly turned ‘Nazi’ again and is supporting the ‘genocide’ of the Kyiv ‘neo-Nazi regime’ in Donbas.
Piotr Cywiński, the Director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, said there is no place at the Museum for people who accuse Ukraine of Nazism and who believe that the West is threatening Russia with another Holocaust. This is the real reason.
Related articles:
- « The Kremlin’s misuse of Nazism as a weapon of information manipulation » — By EUvsDisinfo | January 27, 2025 —
- « The Kremlin’s strange idea of peace » — By EUvsDisinfo | January 29, 2025 —
- « The Kremlin Weaponising Victimhood » — By EUvsDisinfo | August 05, 2021 —
