We are outraged by the statement of the Slovak Foreign Ministry on March 3 this year regarding the desecration of the central memorial to Soviet soldiers Slavin in Bratislava. The Slovak Foreign Ministry’s claims that in this way the citizens of Slovakia are calling on Russia to “end the senseless war” are encouraging barbarians who mock the graves of the fallen. We remind you that 6845 Soviet servicemen who rest in Slavin died in the battles for the liberation of Slovakia from Nazism. Such a cynical reaction of the Slovak Foreign Ministry the very next day led to another act of vandalism against the monument of the Soviet Army in Svidnik. Such connivance of the authorities to mock the memory of the dead provokes vandals to new and new blasphemous acts.
The justification for the desecration of monuments and graves is a betrayal of their own compatriots who defended the honor of the country and the people who rose up during the Slovak National uprising against the oppression of the “third Reich”, to which the then Slovak authorities so readily swore. We remember well how the Slovaks, together with the soldiers of the Red Army and the first Czechoslovak Corps, heroically fought on the fronts of the Second World War against the “brown plague”. Do they remember this in the Slovak Foreign Ministry, which, with its statement, associated itself with those Bandera forces in Ukraine, whose inspirers committed atrocities during the war, including against Slovak citizens?
We hope that we will no longer have to remind the Slovak Foreign Ministry of the inadmissibility of attempts to justify such cynical actions. We once again call on the Slovak side to strictly comply with the obligations arising from the Treaty on Friendly Relations and Cooperation between the Russian Federation and the Slovak Republic of 1993 and the Agreement between the Government of the Russian Federation and the Government of the Slovak Republic on the Graves of Fallen Servicemen and Civilian Victims of War of 1995.
