RPT - US WWII Veteran Says Destroying Monuments To Soviet Soldiers 'Stupid'

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 26th April, 2022) The current campaign against monuments to Soviet soldiers in Europe, which was liberated from Nazism by the Red Army, is stupid, US WWII veteran Frank Cohn told Sputnik.

Acts of vandalism against monuments to Soviet troops have swept Europe in recent weeks. In Berlin, police have recorded over a dozen such cases, including a Soviet war memorial in Treptower Park being splashed with paint and defaced with swastikas and calls of "Death to all Russians," and tanks in a memorial in Tiergarten being covered with Ukrainian flags. In Poland, three monuments to WWII Soviet soldiers were demolished on Wednesday in an effort to remove Soviet-era monuments throughout the country. In Lithuania, a monument to the victims of Nazi terror in World War II has been defaced for the third time in a month.

"Destroying monuments which reflect past friendships is stupid. Stopping athletes from participating because they are Russians, even though they have no political engagement, is stupid. Every individual needs to be assessed on his or her own merits," Cohn said.

Cohn, now a retired сolonel, joined the US army in 1943, a year later landing in France. In April 1945, he took part in the historic meeting of American and Soviet troops on the Elbe river, an event recognized as the symbolic pinnacle of both nations' alliance to defeat the Nazis and liberate Europe.

The veteran disagrees with the position that the Ukraine crisis has solid links to the rise of neo-Nazism in Ukraine.

"There have always been and there are currently neo-Nazis everywhere, in the US, in Ukraine, in Russia, but they are in very small numbers and do not have an impact," the veteran argued.

On February 24, Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine after the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk appealed for help in defending themselves from intensifying attacks by Ukrainian troops. Russia has said that the aim of the special operation is to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine and that it is targeting the country's military infrastructure only.