MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday praised Soviet soldiers for ending the "total evil" of Auschwitz on the 80th anniversary of the Red Army's liberation of the Nazi death camp.
Auschwitz was the largest of the extermination camps and has become a symbol of Nazi Germany's genocide of six million European Jews, one million of whom died at the site between 1940 and 1945, along with more than 100,000 non-Jews.
Soviet troops found 7,000 survivors when they arrived on January 27, 1945.
"We will always remember that it was the Soviet soldier who crushed this terrible, total evil and won the victory, the greatness of which will forever remain in world history," Putin said, according to the Kremlin.
"We will do everything to defend the right of people to ethnic, linguistic and spiritual identity, and to prevent the spread of anti-Semitism, Russophobia and other racist ideologies," he added.
The Russian leader often invokes the Soviet Union's defeat of Nazi Germany in his speeches, especially in the context of Russia's offensive in Ukraine.
Putin has regularly accused Ukrainian and Western officials of "Nazism" and "Russophobia", using this as a pretext to launch the assault in February 2022.
Russian officials were not invited to the commemorations in Poland for the third year running since the Ukraine offensive began, after organisers said their presence would be "cynical".