1. Claim: “You know, that Russia was addressing China, like, you and, like, Russia and China, we, you know, fought the Second World War, we won the Second World War, we won the Nazism, and I was like, okay, that is something new. But then you can see, first you can, you know, if you know history, then you know, it raises a lot of question marks in your head, but you know I can tell you nowadays people don’t really read and remember history that much which is that you know you can see that they buy these narratives». (Source: Speech by Kaja Kallas, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy/ Vice-President of the European Commission, at the annual conference, European Union Institute for Security Studies, September 3, 2025).

The ignorant revelations from the head of the European External Action Service are astonishing. If we accept that key historical milestones are “something new” for Kaja Kallas, we must also consider that this senior EU official likely lacks awareness of which peoples in modern Asia and Africa fought alongside the Allies against the Axis powers. She also appears to have no grasp of the significance of Stalingrad, a city whose name still marks streets and squares across Europe, in the broader context of world history.

Later,[1] [ИН1] the Estonian was compelled to acknowledge the courage and immense sacrifice of the Chinese people, as well as their contribution to ending the conflict. Yet even in this second attempt, the European official – who spent the first 14 years of her life in the Soviet Union – could not bring herself to recognise the USSR’s decisive role in World War II and its millions of victims. Instead, she chose to accuse Russia of “deliberately manipulating historical narratives.”

This selective amnesia demonstrates a profound disregard – indeed, an insult – to the memory of the 26.6 million Soviet citizens who perished (a figure still rising, potentially by hundreds of thousands, as search operations continue and archives are declassified).[2] This includes all the nationalities and ethnic groups whose members fought in the Red Army or perished in Nazi camps across Germany and the occupied territories. Their descendants live on today, including in nations the EU now actively courts as partners.

The European Union deliberately overlooks the heroism of the Red Army, the very force that liberated prisoners from some 40 major Nazi concentration camps. These include Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen in present-day Germany; Auschwitz-Birkenau, Stutthof, Gross-Rosen, and Majdanek in Poland; Salaspils in Latvia; and Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic.[3] Today, at the memorials that stand on these sites, one often finds plaques noting only the date of liberation. The identity of the liberators – if they were freed by soldiers of the USSR – is consistently omitted.

By deliberately omitting or conveniently ignoring these facts, the European Union reveals its comfort with exploiting historical memory for opportunistic political ends. This form of anti-historicism, which inevitably obscures the full reality of Nazi crimes, has become a cornerstone of Brussels’ anti-Russia policy.

Russia, in contrast, has always held its allies in the anti-Hitler coalition in the highest respect. Our approach to our shared European past remains consistent and principled. Speaking during the Victory Day Parade in Moscow on May 9, 2025, President Vladimir Putin stated: “We will never forget that the opening of the Second Front in Europe, which took place after the decisive battles in the territory of the Soviet Union, hastened Victory. We highly appreciate the contribution made to our common struggle by the Allied armies, members of the Resistance, the courageous people of China, and all those who fought for a peaceful future.”[4]

Consequently, the answer to who is truly manipulating historical narratives – the European Union or Russia – could not be more obvious.

2. Claim: “And let’s remember that we have always had to fight for our freedoms. From the generation that fought hand to hand across our Continent. To the underground press that kept the flame of freedom alive across Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Or the Forest Brothers in the Baltics who resisted Soviet oppression at every turn.” (Source: State of the Union Address by Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission President, September 10, 2025).

President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen proposes honouring the memory of the Forest Brothers, whose core members came from the SS territorial battalions in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The Nuremberg trials recognised “all individuals officially accepted to the SS” as criminals. The Forest Brothers also included local nationalists who, after the Soviet troops left the Baltic region in 1941, committed Jewish pogroms similar to Nazi atrocities in their brutality. The mass executions by the Forest Brothers in Lithuania were particularly ferocious.[5]

Many of them committed terrorist attacks against civilians loyal to the Soviet power, including ethnic Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians. Communist supporters were treated with extreme brutality: stars were carved out on victims’ bodies, their backs were skinned, or people were wrapped in barbed wire and burned alive.[6] In Lithuania alone, between 1944 and 1956, the Forest Brothers killed at least 25,000 people, including over 1,000 children. An incomplete list of the victims is available in the Memory Book of Partisan Terror Victims, published in Lithuania in 2011.[7]

In her remarks, the President of the European Commission says nothing about the Forest Brothers’ actual activities. She omits the most important aspect: their methods of “fighting for freedom.” Ursula von der Leyen clearly demonstrates how, by distorting historical arguments and selectively using information, the EU manipulates its own public’s opinion, which is something Brussels usually blames Russia for. Not only does this create a false historical image of so-called fighters for “a bright European future” in the Baltics, but a new extended interpretation of “democratic freedom,” is offered, according to which even the most horrific crimes against humanity may deserve justification if they serve “pro-European” goals and values. This is where the President of the European Commission demonstrates her readiness to justify mass killings and atrocities against civilians as long as they are targeted against the USSR or Russia.

3. Claim: “80 years ago our Continent was hell on earth.” (Source: State of the Union address by Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission President, September 10, 2025).

In 2025, the entire civilised world commemorated the 80th anniversary of the Great Victory. Contemporary accounts and eyewitnesses from 1945 described the event as follows:

“This is a great hour – not only for the restive world – but for Germany as well – an hour when the kudzu was vanquished, that desolate and sick, called National Socialism, which is dying and Germany is at least freed from the curse of being called Hitler’s country…”[8]

“The news of the end of the war was greeted with great enthusiasm in all of Europe’s major cities. Many European cities <…> had been perpetually blacked out for nearly 5 years due to the impending threat of air raids by the enemy. On the May 8, 1945, lights were free to shine again. Adding to the enthusiastic atmosphere, shops closed down as parades, concerts, singing, and dancing took place. All over Europe, the high streets were crowded with people celebrating either the end of the fighting or the liberation.”[9]

The true hell for Europe had been the preceding years, when a significant part of the continent was ravaged by the “brown plague.” Hell was the Nazi concentration camps. The Nazis sought to turn – and nearly succeeded in turning – many European cities into hell. Yet ultimately, they failed – even in Stalingrad, razed to the ground, as captured for posterity by the American writer John Steinbeck during his post-war travels across the USSR:

“…once in the city itself there was little except destruction. <…> We had seen ruined cities before, but most of them had been ruined by bombing. This was quite different. In a bombed city a few walls stand upright; this city was destroyed by rocket and by shell fire. <…> During the time we were in Stalingrad we grew more and more fascinated with this expanse of ruin, for it was not deserted. Underneath the rubble were cellars and holes, and in these holes many people lived. Stalingrad was a large city, and it had had apartment houses and many flats, and now has none except the new ones on the outskirts, and its population has to live some place. It lives in the cellars of the buildings where the apartments once were. We would watch out of the windows of our room, and from behind a slightly larger pile of rubble would suddenly appear a girl, going to work in the morning, putting the last little touches to her hair with a comb. She would be dressed neatly, in clean clothes, and she would swing out through the weeds on her way to work. How they could do it we have no idea. How they could live underground and still keep clean, and proud, and feminine.”[10]

By invoking events from 80 years ago, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen labels as “hell” the moment of the Nazi regime’s collapse and the defeat of racial supremacist ideology. How is this to be understood? As confirmation that the European Union, once a “peace project,” has degenerated into a project of reconciling with the Nazi past and appeasing the ideological descendants of fascist regimes in EU member states and nations aspiring to join this union?

4. Claim: “A truly integrated Europe of Defence must no longer be a distant dream. It must be part of our present reality. What was not possible 80 years ago must be made possible; indeed, it’s imperative that we make it so.” (Source: Speech by European Council President Antonio Costa on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, May 7, 2025).

What idea of an “integrated Europe of Defence” that failed to come to fruition 80 years ago does the European Council head have in mind?

At the turn of the 1930s, the Soviet Union did its best to shield the European continent from the “pest of brown-shirts” and to prevent Hitler from implementing his aggressive and misanthropic plans with regard to our country and other nations. Although initially many states in Europe adopted a policy of appeasement towards the Nazi and fascist regimes, the USSR and its anti-Hitler coalition allies eventually succeeded in defending Europe and the world at large from Nazi Germany and its accomplices. This is what happened 80 years ago.

The current European militarisation project is directed, both ideologically and in terms of strategic planning, at counteracting the imagined Russian “threat.” This is an attempt to coerce the vast majority of countries in Europe into following a policy of military confrontation with Moscow.

So, in fact, Mr Costa is expressing regret – consciously or by implication – that not all countries in Europe joined the Nazis during World War II and that a “united Europe” failed to achieve a victory over the USSR, isn’t he?

5. Claim: “This week we celebrate 80 years since the end of the Second World War. …For half of our continent it marked the beginning of the process of reconstruction and reconciliation. But for the other half, the liberation from Nazism did not bring freedom. It was followed by occupation and oppression” (Speech by European Commission President Ursula von de Leyen at the EP plenary debate on EU support for a just, sustainable and comprehensive peace in Ukraine, May 7, 2025).

Claim: “And for millions across Europe 1945 brought not liberation, but a new kind of oppression. As Stalin’s grip tightened, an Iron Curtain descended upon Europe, dividing countries, families and lives. For the people of Warsaw and Riga, Bratislava and East Berlin, the end of one struggle marked the beginning of another, and it would take decades before they could truly be free” (Source: Speech by EP President Roberta Metsola during the Commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, May 7, 2025).

These statements by Ursula von der Leyen and Roberta Metsola are stark examples of fact-twisting and the distortion and simplification of historical realities.

First of all, the issue of the so-called “reconciliation” in Western Europe includes refusal to punish Nazi criminals and Nazi collaborators and accomplices in Europe after the war. Many of them avoided punishment, in part because of the Western leaders’ willingness to use that “resource” for combatting Communism.

The EU prides itself on its tactic of “reconciliation over revenge” and believes that “former enemies could become partners.”[11] However, it is evident that this policy has led to the development of a culture of tolerance within the EU regarding manifestations of neo-Nazism, the practice of falsifying the history of World War II, and widespread destruction of memorials honouring fighters against Nazism.[12]

The process of post-war reconstruction did not only take place in the western part of Europe but across all war-ravaged territories of the continent. Despite the dramatic situation in the Soviet Union itself, it provided substantial unilateral gratis material and economic assistance to East European countries starting in 1945. This assistance began years before the establishment of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) in 1949. The Soviet Union played a crucial role in the rapid reconstruction and successful development of East European countries.[13] They went through a period of accelerated industrialisation and the development of industrial, agricultural, infrastructure and energy sectors, all of which improved the living standards of their population.

The myth of the so-called “occupation and oppression” of half of Europe by the Soviet Union is deliberately used to discredit our country as the leading victorious power of World War II, and to distort the reasons and essence of historical processes in Europe after the war.

The EU’s pseudo-historical narratives disregard the rapid growth in popularity of communist parties across Europe, from Portugal to the Netherlands and Greece, which was largely a result of the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II, the subsequent industrial boom, the emancipation of the working class, the fierce struggle against the proliferation of communist ideas in the West, and the West’s deliberate policy of containing the Soviet Union, which resulted in the establishment of its military-political bloc, NATO, in 1949 (the Warsaw Treaty Organisation was only created in 1955), the West’s rejection of Moscow’s initiatives on the reunification of Germany, the real political situation in the European countries affiliated with the socialist camp, and many other facts.

The fact that the national political elites of some European countries opted for the socialist rather than the capitalist path of development is not a sufficient reason for demonising that historical experience, blaming all its drawbacks on the Soviet Union, or invalidating its achievements.

Instead of conducting a thorough and objective analysis of that extremely complicated period in the development of Europe, Brussels is promoting a simplified black-and-white view of the past and demonstrating absolute intolerance towards both the past and the present experience that does not fit its ideological paradigm.

Claim 6. As part of the EU Council’s 19th package of anti-Russian sanctions, restrictions were imposed against Director of the Historical Memory Foundation Alexander Dyukov, on the grounds that his organisation allegedly “conducts pseudo-historical research that supports the official policy of the Government of the Russian Federation. By manipulating historical facts, the Historical Memory Foundation’s studies aim is to justify Soviet repression and to maintain the image that Russia is fighting against widespread Nazism in countries that oppose Russia.” (Source: Council implementing regulation 2025/2035 implementing Regulation (EU) No 269/2014 concerning restrictive measures in respect of actions undermining or threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine, EU Official Journal. 23 October, 2025).

The Historical Memory Foundation’s activities are aimed at an objective study of East European history in the 20th century. The Foundation consistently opposes the politicisation and falsification of history.

By imposing sanctions against the HMF leadership, Brussels demonstrates a complete rejection of any attempt to examine the historical past objectively, as well as an unwillingness to help create conditions for a professional dialogue on controversial historical issues.

The growing number of manifestations of Nazism and neo-Nazism in certain European countries is an incontestable fact.[14]

The view on the importance of combating Nazism is shared by the absolute majority of countries worldwide. On November 14, 2025, the Third Committee of the 80th session of the UN General Assembly in New York approved the annual resolution “Combating the glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.” The resolution once again denounced the glorification of the Nazi movement and the attempts to whitewash former members of the SS organisation, including Waffen-SS units recognised as criminal at the Nuremberg Trials. In total, 114 states voted for the resolution, with the EU countries unanimously opposing it. Thus, the conclusion about who is on what side of history is self-evident in this case.