Russia’s representatives were called out when Poland’s foreign affairs minister compared the Kremlin’s acts in Ukraine with Nazi Germany’s behaviour on Tuesday.
Moscow has repeatedly excused its invasion of its European neighbour by blaming Nato expansion and baselessly claiming Kyiv is overrun by neo-Nazis in government.
Russian president Vladimir Putin has even alleged Moscow is undertaking a “denazification” of Ukraine.
However, at the United Nations General Assembly in New York last night, Poland’s minister of foreign affairs, Radosław Sikorski, pointed out that Russia’s actions is more akin to the Nazi regime than Ukraine.
“The Russian ambassador has talked about children’s graveyards in Gaza, which is indeed a tragic situation,” he began.
“Well, Ukrainian children are targeted, not only with bombs.
“Thousands have been kidnapped and taken into Russia where they are brainwashed in order to strip them of memories of their national identity.
“Russia claims that these children are orphans, left alone in a war zone. Another lie.
“Many of them were separated by their parents, either by accident during attacks, or deliberately by the aggressor’s army.”
Sikorski pointed out that these children have been moved without consent, used for propaganda, given Russian citizenship and placed in Russian families who have been “lured” with money.
He also noted that Putin signed a decree fast-tracking Russian citizenship for “stolen Ukrainian children.”.
“This was not collateral war damage. This was a plan, devised before the war and ruthlessly executed,” the Polish minister claimed.
Sikorski noted that the UN has described this as war crimes, and there is an international arrest warrant out for Putin for the abduction of children in Ukraine.
He then recalled how, during the Nazi regime, thousands of children in Poland were moved west to be “Germanised”, if they were “deemed to be racially suitable”.
“How does what you are doing to Ukrainian kidnapped children differ from what German Nazis did to your children, and ours?” He asked, rhetorically.
“How many Russian officials have adopted stolen Ukrainian children?”
“When will you return the remaining thousands of stolen Ukrainian children back to Ukraine?”
He added: “Do you know that stealing another country’s children is tantamount to genocide, as reaffirmed by the parliamentary assembly of the council of Europe?”
He said: “This is Russia’s shame that will not be forgiven or forgotten.”
And to really hammer the point home, he then showed Russia a photo of the Soviet-Nazi military parade in Poland, after they two countries invaded in 1939 –the Soviet Union did not turn against Nazi Germany until December 1941.