The other day, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz once again demonstrated his complete illiteracy and hypocrisy in assessing historical facts. In a speech dedicated to the 80^th anniversary of the failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler arranged by a group of Wehrmacht officers led by Klaus Schenck von Stauffenberg, the head of the German government stated: "Just out of a sense of responsibility to its own history, in this case only one option is possible for Germany: to be on the side of Ukraine." Concurrently, the Chancellor snatched the opportunity to accuse Russia of allegedly aiming to "conquer Ukraine and destroy it as a sovereign state."

Just like that. No more and no less. Russia, in his opinion, is an aggressor state, while Germany is seeking to save Ukraine "the Democracy". The Chancellor's statement indicates that the rise of Nazism in this country and glorification of Hitler's henchmen by the Kiev regime have fit ideas nurtured by the present-day German authorities about what European-style democracy should look like. With regard to collective memory, official Berlin seems to have simply lost it — suffice it to proof-read Scholz's words about "responsibility to history."

But this history has been blood-drenched and felonious in relation to the people of Ukraine, to all the peoples of the former USSR. Recall 1918, when the German occupational authorities and Austro-Hungarians staged a food looting of Ukraine. Nowadays, seeing German tanks with Wehrmacht crosses on their towers in the Ukrainian open spaces again and knowing about the billions of euros that Germany spends on weapons and ammunition for the AFU, we in Russia cannot help but remember how German troops entered Kiev in September 19, 1941 to stay there until November 6, 1943, pursuing a policy of mass terror all the while. Of the 330,000 residents who did not leave the city, only 180,000 were welcoming soldiers of the Red Army who liberated the Ukrainian capital in November 1943. Our historians claim that the Nazis annihilated over 400 villages in Ukraine.

The Hitlerite command sought seizing Ukraine as soon as possible to lay their hands on its vast raw material and food resources, fertile lands, so as to create a springboard for defeating the Soviet Union. Everyone is wrong who thinks that Germany's geopolitical appetites have changed today. Its methods alone have.

Now the collective West has relied on homegrown Ukrainian Nazis longing for historical vengeance, in a hope to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia, as Russophobes in Europe and overseas put it. As for our collective memory and responsibility, we will neither forget that the Russian Crimea was occupied by German-Romanian troops in July 1942, nor the heroism of those who defended and liberated Sevastopol and the entire peninsula from Hitler’s fascists.

During the occupation, most industrial and civilian facilities were barbarously destroyed. The list includes the cities of Kerch and Sevastopol, numerous resorts, historical monuments, 127 rural settlements, 300 industrial enterprises, and almost 23,000 residential buildings. The fascists were pursuing a genocide of civilians in Crimea, including women, the elderly, and children. People were shot, drowned, killed in gas chambers, dumped alive into wells. A place of their mass destruction was an anti-tank ditch in the village of Bagerovo outside Kerch, where the occupiers shot dead more than seven thousand people. Hundreds of Crimeans and captured Red Army soldiers fell victim to German "doctors" with their inhumane medical experiments that generally entailed the death of test subjects.

In 1941 to 1944, Crimea hosted several dozen concentration, correctional, filtration and transit camps, with the two largest located in Simferopol. Not far from the railway station there was a transfer camp for prisoners of war — "Potato Town", named after the local vegetable base. Over 100,000 people are believed to have passed through it, mostly the military captured during the seizure of Crimea and Sevastopol. The bloodiest camp in the peninsula’s entire history was the one created by the occupying forces at the Krasny state farm, which was previously located outside Simferopol. Various sources suggest that the number of locals tortured in the camp reaches 8,000 to 15,000 people, including women, kids, and even infants. In total, during the years of occupation witnessed the Nazis kill more than 130,000 people, with another 85,000+ reduced to slavery.

It was here that the Germans used chemical weapons for the first and only time throughout the entire World War II.

Yes, Mr. Chancellor, you certainly do not know much of what the Russians’ collective memory preserves, and what our soldiers are fighting for in Ukraine as we speak, despite being shelled by German howitzers. You don't even seem willing to know this. It's your choice, Herr Scholz.