German Führer Adolf Hitler faced more public dissent and resistance to systematic murders and other war crimes committed by his Nazi regime than authoritarian President Vladimir Putin is up against today in modern Russia, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha said in a public statement Monday.
Sybiha wrote in a post published on X and parallel platforms:
“During the Third Reich, about 800,000 of 80 million Germans were arrested for dissent and opposing war. In Putin’s Russia, about 20,000 Russians out of 145 million have been arrested for dissent and protesting the war. 800 thousand and 20 thousand. Remember these two figures next time anyone, including the Russian liberal opposition, tells you ‘ordinary Russians are not guilty.’”
Sybiha also added:
“Russians are either more brainwashed than Germans in the Third Reich, more cowardly, or more pro-aggression – or all of the above. This is a complete moral disaster: a nation in the east of Europe is filled with aggression, hatred toward other ethnicities, and readiness to commit the most horrific crimes.”
The Ukrainian foreign minister said that the upcoming 80th anniversary of the opening of the post-WW2 Nuremberg Military Tribunal should remind Ukrainians and their allies that Russia – and Russians – should face consequences for their country’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and launch of the most destructive and bloody European war since World War II.
“As we approach this important date, it is critical to uphold the same high ideals of justice,” Sybiha said. “Only when justice for Russian atrocities and grave crimes against peace and humanity is served can we restore Europe’s moral foundation and ensure that such horrors are never repeated again.”
In past comments, Lavrov and other senior Russian officials have described claims that Russian officials should face prosecution for war crimes as politically motivated, without grounds and “Russophobic.”
On Monday, at roughly the same time Sybiha called for senior Russian officials to face a war crimes tribunal like German Nazi leaders in 1945, Sybiha’s Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov published an “interview” in which he advanced the argument the Soviet Union led the drive to put Germany national leadership to trial and face justice at the end of World War II, and accused the US and Great Britain of appeasing and even collaborating with Hitlerian Germany. Lavrov said in part:
“(T)he Anglo-Saxons were initially expressed their reluctance to setting up an international judicial body which was due to their fears that a trial would somehow lead to the question of what caused the war in the first place, and why, after the Treaty of Versailles, the countries that were supposed to deter and contain Hitler’s Germany, went on to collaborate with Hitler.”
Independent historians generally lay at least a minority share of the blame for World War II on the Soviet Union because during that war’s first major campaign, under the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Germany’s invasion and destruction of independent Poland in September 1939, the Kremlin intervened on Nazi Germany’s side and annexed the eastern third of Poland.
Lavrov’s comments about war crimes culpability made no mention of that.
The Russian foreign minister’s remarks about Russian moral high ground came one day after Ukrainian former oligarch and a high-level politician, Viktor Medvedchuk, gave an exclusive interview to the Russian national news agency TASS asserting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was justified and that Ukraine will not “survive as a state” because – he claimed – a majority of Ukrainians want to be a part of Russia and welcome the presence of Russian troops in Ukraine.
The independent Ukrainian television news channel 24 Kanal, in a Tuesday report, called Medvedchuk’s comments the “Kremlin’s false narrative.” In August 2025, Ukrainian authorities charged Medvedchuk with criminal subversion in favor of Russia. He escaped Ukraine about a week before Russia invaded.
Internal Russian news and officially sanctioned messaging matches the external Kremlin position that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is justified, but at the same time cheers for Russian military action, matching the textbook definition of war crimes.
During a Rossiya 1 national television news broadcast, Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyev told viewers across Russia’s eleven time zones:
“In Kyiv, the [major hydroelectric] dam across the Dnipro River must be destroyed, the city must be flooded, the [Ukraine’s second-largest city] Kharkiv must be destroyed, [the major cities of] Mykolaiv, Odesa and Sumy must be wiped from the face of the Earth, like the city of Dnipro and other cities.”
The Russians’ invasion – killing tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers, and turning a reported four million Ukrainians into war refugees – has devastated once positive views of Russia by Ukrainians. According to a September 2025 survey conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), 91 percent of Ukrainians have a negative attitude towards Russia. Before Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, positive Ukrainian attitudes towards Russia averaged around 80 percent, KIIS data showed.
A Kyiv Post survey of data on Russian missile and drone attacks as reported by the Ukrainian Air Force and civilian authorities from Oct. 18 through Nov. 18, found that the Kremlin over the past 30 days launched six major air attacks against predominantly civilian targets across the country, killing at least 33 civilians and injuring at least 252 civilians.
Most casualties were suffered following drone or missile hits to apartment buildings that collapsed onto people asleep inside. Elderly residents, children, and pregnant women were among the victims.
In the bloodiest attack, on Nov. 13-14, Russian strike packages made up of Zircon hypersonic missiles, Kinzhal aero-ballistic missiles, Iskander surface-to-surface missiles and more than 450 kamikaze drones hit high-rise civilian apartment buildings, schools, energy infrastructure and a hospital in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.
At selected targets, Kremlin forces executed “double-tap” attacks with a follow-up missile hitting a target area 10-20 minutes after an initial strike. The tactic attempts to maximize casualties among first responders.
The most recent battlefield war crime confirmed by Ukrainian authorities was the murder of two Ukrainian prisoners of war by Russian troops in the Zaporizhzhia sector, the news platform censor.net reported on Nov. 14.
Geo-located Ukrainian drone video recorded Russian soldiers using automatic rifle bursts to shoot dead the unarmed Ukrainians at point-blank range.
Ukrainian government ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets, in a statement published the same day, said:
“This is another deliberate step by the Russian Federation aimed at intimidation and demonstrative disregard for the norms of international humanitarian law. Such murders are not isolated cases – they are the foundation of systemic criminal behavior by the aggressor state. [The Russian Federation.]”
Russian opposition leader Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an exiled energy oligarch critical of Putin, in an Oct. 15 statement said that Russian war crimes in Ukraine are real but only the responsibility of the Kremlin leadership, and not the Russian people.
“(O)ordinary Russians are shackled by fear and lies; blaming them collectively plays into Putin’s hands, excusing his crimes while dividing us from the millions yearning for peace and democracy,” Khodorkovsky said. In Oct. 1 public remarks, he said: “Ukraine suffers because of Kremlin terror, not Russian DNA.”