You're reading: ​​Merkel listens as Putin defends USSR’s pact with Nazi Germany

Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Germany's chancellor, Russia’s president defended the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which the USSR signed with Nazi Germany in 1939 to carve up Eastern Europe, in turn triggering the onset of World War II.

The
controversial comments by Vladimir Putin were reportedly made during a May 10 press
conference in Moscow alongside a visiting Andrea Merkel, who snubbed the Russian
leader by demonstratively arriving one day after the Russian capital staged its
largest military parade since Soviet days to commemorate the 70
th
anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany.

While
Merkel used the visit to urge Russia to end its aggression against Ukraine and
ensure implementation of the Minsk II peace accords, Putin reportedly demonstrated his diverging view over the current war in Ukraine and
WWII history by saying there “was sense” to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

“Poland
became a victim of its own policy,” he said, referring to its partition by the
USSR and Nazi Germany in 1939, adding that Kremlin leaders back then signed the
controversial agreements to “avoid direct confrontation.”

“The
pact made sense from a standpoint of security of the Soviet Union. It so
happened that after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its partition, [Poland] itself became the victim of the policy it tried to pursue in Europe,” he added.

It
was not immediately clear how Merkel responded to such a view of WWII history.

Addressing war veterans in Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada two days earlier on May
8 during WWII commemorations, Ukraine’s president drew “obvious parallels”
between inaction that led to history’s bloodiest war and current Russian aggression against
Ukraine.

Petro
Poroshenko condemned past communist Soviet leadership saying WWII could have been avoided “if the Kremlin did not sign the
Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement” to carve up Eastern Europe with Nazi
Germany, and if other nations did not “hide their heads in the sand … and
delight themselves with illusions.”