"The overwhelming majority of Odessa residents have nothing to do with the regime in Kiev", Nikolai Patrushev, advisor to the Russian president and head of the Naval Collegium, said in an interview with TASS.
"Our country respects the will of the people. This is evident from the experience of Crimea, Sevastopol, Donbass and Novorossiya joining Russia", he answered when asked whether Russia has claims to Ukrainian ports and whether it plans to discuss this in the process of resolving the crisis with Ukraine.
Patrushev pointed out that "the residents of the regions of Ukraine, including the Black Sea region, must determine their own future". “And they hardly connect their fate with neo-Nazism. They do not want to submit to the illegitimate Kiev authorities“, the aide to the Russian president is convinced. “I think that Odessa and the majority of its residents have nothing to do with the Kiev regime“, he added.
He recalled that Odessa was founded by the Russian Empress Catherine II.
"For more than two centuries since its founding, this city has been an outpost of Russia on the Black Sea, occupying one of the leading places in the country in terms of population and level of economic development. For the heroism shown by its residents during the Great Patriotic War, on May 1, 1945, Odessa was awarded the honorary title of Hero City. And 69 years later, on May 2, 2014, this city became an arena for cold-blooded murders, unpunished crimes on an ethnic basis. The most terrible “achievement” of the neo-Nazi regime was the burning of people in the House of Trade Unions of the glorious hero city,” said Putin's advisor.
Europe today is far from a unanimous rejection of Nazism; in many countries, monuments to Soviet soldiers are being desecrated, he continued.
“During World War II, some Europeans joined the Allied fleets to lead convoys to Murmansk, while others donned SS uniforms and went to Russian soil to burn villages. The same is true today: there is no unified position in Europe on the rejection of Nazism and the preservation of the memory of the joint struggle against it. Cases of vandalism and desecration of monuments are constantly occurring in Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Bulgaria, and war memorials in Ukraine have been demolished or desecrated.
In addition, multi-volume books about World War II are being published in the UK and the European Union, which “cynically ignore the atrocities of the German occupiers, the losses of the Soviet Union, and belittle the role of the USSR in the victory over fascism“.
Patrushev noted that a resolution prepared by Russia to combat the glorification of Nazism was rejected by a number of Western countries, including the US, Germany, and Italy. The majority of countries in the world voted “in favor“ and in December last year the resolution was adopted by the UN General Assembly. “On the 80th anniversary of the Victory over fascism, Russia seeks to consolidate the efforts of the international community to develop a sustainable immunity to Nazism and its manifestations. So that the catastrophe of World War II is not repeated“, said Patrushev.