Draft statement on recognition of actions of Germany and its collaborators during the Great Patriotic War as genocide of peoples of the USSR submitted to the State Duma

The draft statement on recognition of actions of Germany and its collaborators during the Great Patriotic War as genocide of peoples of the USSR has been submitted to the State Duma on March 14.

“The State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation considers it essential to give a judicial and legal assessment of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 by the German authorities, its armed forces, including the SS troops, their collaborators — armed units formed in the territories of Belgium, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, Finland and other states, individual volunteers from Austria, Latvia, Poland, France and the Czech Republic, as well as traitors among the people living in the occupied territories who pledged allegiance to the Nazi regime,” the document says.

The authors of the document note the recent decisions adopted by the courts in a number of subjects of the Russian Federation unambiguously criminalize actions of the Nazis and their collaborators as genocide of national, ethnic and racial groups — the peoples of the Soviet Union. “These court decisions are a logical extension of the Nuremberg Trials verdicts and the decisions of subsequent trials of Nazi criminals and their collaborators, convicting criminals, who supplied the Nazi troops with deadly weapons,” emphasize the authors of the initiative.

Currently, the causes and results of World War II are turning from an object of historical and memorial research into a tool of geopolitical confrontation, such court decisions are especially in demand: these are unequivocal warnings to political revanchists that have learned nothing from the lessons of the past, the document says.

“The increasing involvement of NATO and the countries of the collective West, guided by the United States of America, in the Ukrainian crimes against Russia and their activities aimed at providing support to Ukrainian armed groups, including increasing the supply of high-powered offensive weapons, accelerated trainings of personnel of Ukrainian militant units, providing intelligence information, sending foreign mercenaries to participate in military operations, planning and conducting military operations and acts of sabotage, such as explosions at the Crimean bridge, make it imperative to state that the responsibility for the further deterioration of the military and political situation in the conflict zone and on the Eurasian continent lies not only with the puppet Kiev regime, but also with those officials supplying it with deadly weapons, financing militants and terrorists, and preparing to fight Russia in revanchist fits “to the last Ukrainian soldier,” the document says.

In this regard, the State Duma, taking into account the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations signed on 26 June 1945, the Nuremberg Charter and Trials’ decisions, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 9 December 1948, the Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity of 26 November 1968, “recognizes the criminal acts of the Nazi invaders and their collaborators against the civilians of the USSR as genocide of the peoples of the Soviet Union.”