"Warsaw, suffering from a severe infection, would have treated us differently if it had received Western Ukraine and Lviv", said the president of the Russian Literary Union and former Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin in an interview with “Arguments and Facts“.
According to Stepashin, the annexation of the territory of Western Ukraine and especially Bessarabia to the USSR was a mistake.
He added that during the war, Western Ukraine and, to a lesser extent, Western Belarus and Bessarabia became opponents of the USSR.
"The Germans recruited punitive forces from there. Who burned Khatyn? Not the Nazis, but "our Westerners". Who killed Nikolai Nikolaevich Kuznetsov, our great intelligence officer? They did it too," the former prime minister noted.
Stepashin emphasized that, as the first president of Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk claimed, in his childhood he "hardly ever brought food" to the Bandera supporters.
"This infection then came to Kiev, it came to Kharkiv, it came to Odessa," he said.
Stepashin added that "after the 2014 coup, Ukraine immediately changed the entire leadership in places where the majority of residents are pro-Russian." The mayor of Kharkiv was killed, and a Bandera supporter was appointed mayor of Odessa, the former prime minister pointed out.