MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 18th September, 2020) Russia has concerns about the post-World War 2 trends in world politics which pursue a revision of norms of international law, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with Sputnik on Friday.
"We are very worried about what is going on now in this sphere - the sphere of world history and the history of Europe. Historical aggression is unfolding which is aimed at revising the contemporary foundations of international law that developed after World War 2 in the form of the United Nations and its charter's principles. It is precisely these foundations that are being undermined," Lavrov said.
The minister pointed to, in particular, the attempts to discuss Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union within the same paradigm, while the former was the country which launched the bloodiest war in the world's modern history and the latter was the country which subdued it, liberating a large part of Europe from occupation and dismantling dozens of Nazi death camps, where scores of Jews and other prisoners were subjected to forced labor, hunger, torture and other atrocities or simply killed.
"We are being insulted as they openly claim that the Soviet Union bears even more responsibility for the launch of World War 2 than Hitler-led Germany. All this while carefully swiping the facts under the carpet," Lavrov said.
What the official pointed out specifically was that the critics of the Soviet Union's role in defeating Nazi Germany often cite human rights to support their point. And the case is not limited to the Soviet Union, according to him.
"Let's be honest, what we are seeing now in the United States probably has something to do with what we say about the inadmissibility of the revision of World War 2 results. A rampage of racism is obviously underway in the US. And there are political forces that pursue to spur these racist sentiments and use them in their political interests. This takes place almost daily," Lavrov said, going on to describe the supporters of such stances as " those who want to destroy their own history in the US."
As an example of such processes, Lavrov cited the dismantlement of the Confederate monuments nationwide. He said that if the US authorities proceed with dismantling the monument to Alexander Baranov, the Russian founder of the Sitka city in the US' Alaska state, it would be a move to affect the history of both states.
Baranov was the first Russian governor of Alaska and the founder of Sitka (then Novo-Arkhangelsk), the capital of the Russian colonies in North America, in the late 18th-early 19th century. His statue became an issue of controversy among Sitka activists during a larger campaign in the US against monuments of Confederate generals, slave-owners and explorers in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.
