On the 83rd anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre in Ukraine, where the Nazis murdered more than 30,000 Jews over two days, a fierce confrontation is continuing on the subject between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken - whose stepfather was a Holocaust survivor - and the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova.
What upset the Russians was a post on the X by Blinken in which he wrote: "We remember the Babyn Yar massacre on Sept 29 - 30, 1941, when 34,000 Jews were murdered by Nazis. Today, Russia falsely claims it’s 'de-Nazifying' Ukraine by engaging in crimes against humanity in a country that was brutalized by both the Nazi and Soviet regimes."
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Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky at the monument to the Babi Yar massacre victims
(Photo: Office of the president of Ukraine)
Zakharova published a long post, in which she attacked "scoundrel" Blinken.
"Only a scoundrel could say this because Russia is denazifying those who continued the crimes of the Babi Yar murderers: Russia is denazifying the Bandera followers who glorified the collaborators Bandera and Shukhevych," Zakharova wrote in a statement, referring to prominent Ukrainian nationalist leaders who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.
"Only a scoundrel could say this, because Jews, Romas and Soviet POWs were murdered in Babi Yar. Thirty-four thousand were murdered in the first two days alone. The total number of those shot has not yet been precisely established, but it exceeds 100,000 (estimates are up to 120,000 and even 150,000).
"Only a scoundrel could say this, because there are monuments to Nazi collaborators erected in Blinken’s country," she also shot back.
"Innocent Soviet citizens were shot in Babi Yar by Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C and the 45th Battalion of the German police, to which units from the Ukrainian auxiliary police from the western occupied regions — Bukovina, Volyn, Galicia and Transcarpathia — were transferred and attached to. They were the ones who met the arrivals and directed them to the place where they had to put their belongings, take off their clothes, shoes and even underwear. The victims’ personal belongings, collected and not appropriated by the punishers, were sent to a special warehouse in dozens of trucks.
"Those units were subordinate to the RSHA (Reich Main Security Office) and directly to the SS, whose symbols are so popular with today’s Ukrainian followers of Bandera and Shukhevych," she added.
The response, more than two years after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, is not the first time Zakharova has pointed out that it was Russia who liberated Ukraine from the Nazis during World War II.
Zakharova wrote in 2023 following another Blinken post about Bibi Yar about the American top diplomat's "audacity to lie about one of the most appalling tragedies of World War II: the massacre of civilians in Soviet Kiev on September 29-30, 1941, in the Babi Yar ravine. Right after occupying the city, the Nazis began their cleansing operations. Within a few days, tens of thousands of Jews, Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war were executed. On September 29-30 alone, the Nazis brutally butchered 34,000 people: this was what Blinken was referring to as he cynically lied about the memory of this tragedy in the USSR, 'forgetting that the executions continued right up to the liberation of Kiev by the Red Army in November 1943."
Zakharova added: "We remember everyone: tens of thousands of people of non-Aryan race, partisans and prisoners: all those whom the Nazis sentenced to die and whose remains were left in the Babi Yar ravine. Everyone who lost their lives. Everyone who fell victim to the German idea of superiority. Those who did not live to see the liberation of the Ukrainian SSR capital by the Soviet soldiers. The US Secretary of State wrote in his post: “Soviets buried this history” by which he meant that they hushed it up. This is a blatant lie, monstrous in its ignorance and cynicism. No other country in the world so consistently held Nazism accountable for the crimes of the Holocaust as the Soviet Union."
She said that for the Soviet people, "Babi Yar was a bleeding wound like Khatyn, Treblinka or Auschwitz, which was liberated by Soviet soldiers."
"Yet Blinken had the audacity to write that we don’t or didn’t remember the past, and he did that on the anniversary of the tragedy. On the other hand, what is left to be desired from the U.S. secretary of state who was declared one of the most influential Jews in the world last year by an Israeli magazine but who found no words to condemn the honoring of a Nazi in the Canadian parliament? What do we want from the U.S. Secretary of State who issues orders to finance the Nazi regime in Kiev, a regime that glorifies the collaborators Bandera and Shukhevich? What do we want from the U.S. secretary of state who issues an order to vote against the UN General Assembly resolution condemning neo-Nazism, racism and xenophobia?"
In a parting shot, she wrote that "Blinken’s stepfather, Samuel Pisar, was a Holocaust survivor who was in several death camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau. He recalled with gratitude the role of the USSR and Soviet soldiers’ contribution to the Victory over Nazism until the end of his life. I wonder what he would say today to his stepson's lies."