President Putin attended a memorial in his hometown of St. Petersburg, on the occasion of the lifting of the siege of St. Petersburg (then called Leningrad) on January 18, 1943. He also used the occasion to meet with veterans from the Leningrad siege and to visit a defense plant in the region and to talk about the special military operation in Ukraine.
Speaking to workers at the Obukhov plant, a part of the aerospace defense production, Putin said, “I want to emphasize this: we are absolutely justified in saying that we are fighting neo-Nazis, because there Bandera, who collaborated with Hitler and shot civilians, and his henchmen were engaged in the killing of civilians, was elevated to the rank of a national hero of Ukraine. How can you imagine it? And everyone keeps quiet, does not notice, pretends not to notice. But it’s true! And they continue this practice—both the practice of detachments and the practice of shooting civilians. They continue these abuses of civilians in the Donbass and adjacent territories, by the way.
