Putin urges West to learn from second World War

RUSSIAN PRIME minister Vladimir Putin has urged western states to use today’s anniversary of the start of the second World War to overcome cold war-era suspicions and work with Moscow to form a new system of collective security.

On the eve of his visit to Poland to attend commemorative events, Mr Putin also called for reconciliation between Warsaw and Moscow, and rejected the view that a Soviet deal with Nazi Germany that carved up eastern Europe helped start the second World War.

Denouncing alleged efforts to "rewrite" history, Mr Putin said western appeasement of Adolf Hitler had left the Soviet Union with little choice but to sign a pact with him. "There are full grounds to condemn the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939. But, after all, a year earlier France and England signed a well-known agreement with Hitler in Munich, destroying all hope for the creation of a joint front for the fight against fascism," he wrote in Poland's Gazeta Wyborczanewspaper.

Germany started the war by attacking Poland on September 1st, 1939, just days after Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop signed a mutual non-aggression treaty with Soviet counterpart Vyacheslav Molotov. Soviet troops invaded Poland 16 days later, acting on the deal with Hitler to divide Europe. Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.

Mr Putin admitted that “today, we understand that any kind of collusion with the Nazi regime was morally unacceptable”, but insisted that the Soviet Union – which was already fighting a border war with Japan – was justified in seeking to avoid a conflict with mighty Germany.

“It is necessary for all of us, both in western and eastern Europe, to remember what tragedies can result from . . . seeking to ensure security and national interests at the expense of others,” Mr Putin wrote. “And there is another lesson to be drawn from history . . . that it is impossible to set up an efficient system of collective security without involvement of all countries of the continent, including Russia.”

His words had particular resonance in Poland, which hopes to host a US missile-defence system that Russia considers a grave threat to its own security.

Mr Putin struck a conciliatory note with Warsaw, saying his compatriots, “who were crippled by a totalitarian regime, fully understand the sensitiveness of Poles about Katyn” – the place where Soviet forces massacred some 20,000 Polish prisoners of war.