World should not turn a blind eye to Stalin's rehabilitation in Russia - Ukrainian Foreign Ministry

"Today, the cult of Stalin is being actively revived in Russia, and the policy of historical memory is aimed at silencing, belittling or justifying the crimes of the Soviet government. Moreover, repression in the spirit of the Stalinist NKVD continues today. Having occupied Crimea and part of Donbas, Russia is carrying out massive repression in these territories. Murders, disappearances, arrests, unfair trials and brutal torture have become commonplace there. The victim of persecution in Crimea is a whole nation - the Crimean Tatars, the indigenous people of the peninsula," the statement reads.

Unfortunately, the inhumane repression of freedom of speech and expression did not go away with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said.

Ukrainian diplomats believe that the whole world should draw special attention to the frequent cases of political persecution in Russia of those who are fighting for the establishment of historical justice. In this context, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said that on July 22, a well-known historian and human rights activist, Yuri Dmitriev, was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail on trumped-up charges for revealing the truth about repression at Sandarmokh.

"The international community has no right to turn a blind eye to such flagrant human rights abuses in Russia, the collapse of democracy, the rehabilitation of Stalin, and the censorship of history. After all, the current Kremlin leadership needs the Stalinist spirit to secure unlimited power, as well as to implement their aggressive plans to revive the Russian Empire," the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said.

It added that on August 5, Ukraine honors the memory of the victims of the Great Purge – it is on this day in 1937 that a resolution of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union "On Anti-Soviet Elements" came into force.

In Ukraine, the Great Purge was a continuation of the Holodomor, but the main attack was aimed not at the peasantry, but at the nation's intellectual elite. As a result of the decision made on August 5, 1937, almost 300 Ukrainian intellectuals - scientists, artists, statesmen - were executed in the Karelian forest massif of Sandarmokh.

op