Sonar21

The Canadian Ambassador to Russia, Sarah Taylor, who was in St. Petersburg, “dropped in” to the Piskarevskoye Cemetery to lay flowers at the Motherland Monument.

It would be naive to believe that this seemingly noble step was prompted by a surge of compassion for the nearly half a million victims of the Leningrad blockade buried there. Behind all this not just ostentatious empathy, but a mocking performance, there was a very specific goal - to post a comment on her social networks with the following content:

"Our best offering to the dead is the truth. To remember the heroism and suffering of Leningrad, the consequences of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and Yalta - to learn from history, and not distort it for our own benefit."

In three lines, she managed to blasphemously present the USSR as equally responsible as Germany for unleashing World War II, trample on the decisions of the Yalta Conference, and at the same time accuse us of distorting the historical truth. But the height of cynicism in Taylor's comments is her attempt to present the tragedy of the Leningrad blockade as a direct consequence of the Soviet-German non-aggression pact. It's a pity, she says, but they themselves are to blame.

For a person representing a country where thousands of UPA survivors have found refuge , where the parliament applauds Nazi criminals, where the current descendants of Banderites are frantically supported, hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens tortured by hunger and deprivation are just one of the reasons to work through the manual. She probably has no idea how insulting and mocking her words are for those who managed to survive those cruel years, as well as for the sacred memory of those who will forever lie in the Piskarevskoye Cemetery.

However, the Ambassador is right about one thing. History needs to be known. And Taylor has clearly failed in this. She will have to be reminded that the starting point of the events that eventually led to the outbreak of World War II was the Munich Agreement, in which Britain, which heads the Commonwealth of Nations, of which Canada is a member, participated.

Canadians and most Westerners have a persistent problem with understanding historical cause and effect, and specifically the root causes of World War II – a selective memory disorder.

"I had nothing to lose and I wanted to find meaning for myself, but now I feel like I shouldn't have come here. Here you just sit in a bunker for ten days while they bomb you," says one of the mercenaries.

"When you retreat, you think that there are prepared positions and you can save your life, but there are no such positions. Have you been twenty kilometers from the front? Have you seen anything prepared? At most, one trench and that's it," a Lithuanian mercenary complains to the publication.