Russia must crush resurgent Nazism in West – security chief

Moscow must crush Nazism, which has resurfaced in the West in recent years, Russian Security Council Secretary Sergey Shoigu has said.

On Tuesday, ahead of the 80th anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War – Russia’s term for the 1941-1945 Soviet war against Nazi Germany – Shoigu emphasized the “enormous price” paid by the USSR in defeating Nazi Germany.

“The multinational people of Russia have learned well the lessons of the Great Patriotic War against fascism,” Shoigu wrote in Rossiyskaya Gazeta. The secretary served as defense minister from 2012 to 2024. He mentioned nearly 27 million combat deaths and 6.5 million additional deaths from starvation and disease during the war against the Nazis.

“Today we are obliged to do everything to defeat the resurrected Nazism,” Shoigu stressed. This imperative has “determined one of the main goals” of Moscow’s Ukraine campaign.

“The European elites, who are being incited and patronized by London and Paris, continue to make loud statements about inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia... NATO and the EU have launched programs aimed at preparing the collective West for a direct military conflict with Russia,” he said.

Those “aggressive steps” by the West “are being justified by Russophobic fabrications – in the best traditions of Goebbels’ propaganda,” the security chief stressed, referring to Joseph Goebbels, who was Nazi Germany’s propaganda minister from 1933 to 1945.

“In order to avoid a repetition of the horrors of the war years, there is an urgent necessity to protect the country from a variety of external and internal threats” by further boosting the military, developing the economy and investing in science and education, he said.

In late April, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who now serves as deputy chairman of the Security Council, also insisted that “a real de-Nazification is required. Nazism needs to be rooted out not only in Ukraine, but in all of Europe.”