Russia has slammed the EU for warning candidate states against attending WWII celebrations on May 9
The Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said Tuesday that the EU’s attempts to pressure candidate states not to attend the 80th anniversary of the victory in World War II in Moscow are tantamount to a revival of Nazism.
On Monday, the bloc’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, warned the leaders of EU members and candidate states against taking part in the event in the Russian capital on May 9. The British daily The Telegraph later wrote that candidate states, such as Serbia, could be barred from joining the bloc if their leaders choose to attend the Victory Day celebrations.
“If this is true, then Euro-Nazism is being reborn before our eyes,” Zakharova wrote on Telegram, citing the article.
“This is how the fascists 80 years ago forced those they considered ‘second-class people’ to renounce their homeland, ethnicity, and faith,” the spokeswoman added.
The Telegraph wrote that EU officials warned Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, who has indicated that he would attend the May 9 parade, that the visit would derail his country’s accession to the bloc.
Vucic’s presence at the event would “come at a cost,” the secretary-general of Estonia’s Foreign Ministry, Jonatan Vseviov, said, according to the newspaper. “The consequence is them not joining the European Union.”
“For us this will be an important litmus test. Basically what we look at is whether or not they are on our side or playing on the other team,” he reportedly said.
Speaking at a press conference in Luxembourg on Monday, Kallas warned that “any participation in the May 9th parades – or celebrations – in Moscow will not [be] taken lightly on the European side.”
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, the only EU member state leader to have indicated he would attend, slammed her statement as “disrespectful” and potentially a form of blackmail.
“Is Ms. Kallas’s warning a form of blackmail or a signal that I will be punished upon my return from Moscow? I don’t know. But I do know that the year is 2025, not 1939,” he wrote on X.
Fico stressed that his attendance is a matter of national sovereignty. “I will go to Moscow to pay tribute to the thousands of Red Army soldiers who died liberating Slovakia, as well as to the millions of other victims of Nazi terror,” he added.
Russia annual Victory Day celebration honors the 1945 triumph of the USSR over Nazi Germany as well as the estimated 26.6 million Soviet lives lost in the conflict.
