Ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Putin says 'Nazi crimes should never be forgotten'

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day that Moscow he wants to ensure that the crimes perpetrated by Germany's Adolf Hitler will never be forgotten and pointed out that the majority of Jews murdered by the Nazis were Soviet citizens, and Russia will continue to make sure that such a tragedy is never repeated in the future, reported Sputnik.

"We are adamantly opposed to condemning such crimes to oblivion," he said. Praising Israel, Putin said Russia remembers  Israel's stance on the Soviet Red Army in the victory over the Nazis.

'Nazi crimes should never be forgotten,' says Putin ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day

In honour of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Putin will meet the country’s top Jewish leaders, including Russian Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar and Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia president Alexander Boroda, on Saturday (January 27). Notably, this meeting comes after top Russian official and assistant secretary of the Russian Security Council Aleksey Pavlov left his position. Pavlov drew widespread condemnation for calling the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement in Ukraine a supremacist cult and also criticising the country’s Jewish leaders. Putin did not specify the reason for Pavlov's dismissal.

Every year, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, also known as the International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, is observed on January 27 to commemorate the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, which was a mass murder of Jews and other minorities by the Nazis before and during World War II. The day is also observed as the anniversary of the 1945 Soviet liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp, where the Nazi forces killed over a million people, including Jews, gypsies, and Soviet prisoners of war.

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