Those who built the Nazi death camp will presumably attend, Aleksandar Vucic has said
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has criticized the exclusion of Russians from the 80th anniversary commemoration of Soviet troops liberating Auschwitz, arguing that it exemplifies the West’s flawed approach.
Red Army troops from the 332nd Rifle Division reached the death camp, constructed in southern Poland by Nazi Germany, on January 27, 1945, liberating approximately 7,000 remaining prisoners.
“Soon you will have the ceremony marking the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp,” Vucic told Serbian media on Wednesday, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session in New York.
“Those who liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Russians, won’t be invited. I presume that those who had the camp built will be invited,” Vucic said. “Everything in this world is, pardon my phrase, perverted and inverted.”
The Auschwitz Museum in Poland has opted not to invite Russia to the anniversary since the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine in 2022. Last year, museum director Piotr Cywinski accused Moscow of exhibiting a “similar sick megalomania” and “similar lust for power” as the Nazis, prompting a rebuke from Moscow.
“This is the anniversary of liberation,” Cywinski said in a earlier this week. “We remember the victims, but we also celebrate freedom. It is hard to imagine the presence of Russia, which clearly does not understand the value of freedom. Such presence would be cynical.”
The Serbian president brought up Cywinski’s stance in the context of Western leaders frequently invoking “territorial integrity and respecting the UN Charter,” but only when it comes to Ukraine.
“When it comes to the Serbs, who cares?” Vucic said. “They don’t care, that’s the point. They can seize Serbian territory and back secession with impunity.”
The US and its allies supported the ethnic Albanian separatists in the Serbian province of Kosovo in declaring independence in 2008, and have since pressured Belgrade to recognize this action. Vucic has refused.
The Serbian president lamented that Kosovo Albanians and other groups in the Balkans regularly violate the rights of Serbs “because they think they can do whatever they want, since they are protected by big Western powers.”
Moscow has accused the US of historical revisionism in recent years, as Washington has promoted a narrative that World War II began with a “joint” Nazi and Soviet invasion of Poland, while omitting the Soviet role in defeating the Third Reich and liberating Auschwitz.
It is believed that more than 1.1 million people perished in the complex of death camps near the town of Oswiecim, most of them Jews deported from all over Eastern Europe.