Moscow’s mission in South Africa has slammed British accusations of “imperialism” 

Britain’s accusations of imperialism against Russia are just the most recent instance of a Western campaign to revise history and replace it with propaganda narratives, the Russian embassy in South Africa has said.

Earlier this week, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of wanting to create a “mafia empire” and claimed that he could recognize imperialism because he was of African heritage.

“The collective West is trying to substitute history with propaganda, step by step,” the Russian embassy in Pretoria said Thursday on X, pointing out a pattern of events.

“The greatest colonial empire ever –Great Britain– somehow links Russia to enslaving peoples of Africa,” the embassy noted, referring to Lammy’s diatribe. 

Russia had no colonies in Africa, while the Soviet Union is widely regarded as having helped many African nations regain independence from European colonial powers, such as the UK, France, Belgium and Portugal. 

“Japan accuses Russia of alleged ‘nuclear threats’ at the 79th anniversary of [the] A-bombing of Hiroshima by the US,” the embassy added. “Russia will not be invited to the 80th anniversary of [the] liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp by Soviet troops.”

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The US dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan in August 1945. At the 2023 commemoration in Hiroshima, taking place during the G7 summit, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida did not once mention the only country to ever use atomic weapons in war, while arguing that “Russia’s nuclear threat” was making Tokyo’s efforts towards a nuclear-free world more complicated. 

Japan has recently been taken under Washington’s “nuclear umbrella” and embarked on a remilitarization program, as part of a bloc with the US and South Korea aimed primarily against China.

Meanwhile, the Auschwitz Memorial Museum in Poland announced this week that Russia would not be invited to the January 2025 ceremonies marking the liberation of the notorious Nazi concentration camp. Museum director Piotr Cywinski claimed that Russia “does not understand the value of freedom” so its presence would be “cynical.”

Troops of the Red Army’s 332nd Rifle Division reached the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp on January 27, 1945, liberating around 7,000 remaining prisoners. 

While the Polish museum invoked the current Russia-Ukraine conflict as the reason for the snub, the US and its Western allies have been minimizing and outright erasing the Soviet Union’s role in WWII for many years before that.

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The USSR did the lion’s share of the fighting against Nazi Germany and bore the brunt of the casualties in the war, losing an estimated 27 million lives in the process.