German Chancellor Angela Merkel phoned Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday to offer her condolences on the 80th anniversary of Germany's World War II invasion of Russia.
June 22, 1941 was the first day of Operation Barbarossa when the Wehrmacht crossed the River Bug and entered the territory of the USSR.
Merkel expressed feelings of empathy in connection with "the incalculable misery and suffering brought by the war unleashed by the Nazi regime," the Kremlin said in a statement.
"Both sides stressed the importance of preserving the historical memory of the tragic events of those years. It was stated that overcoming mutual hostility and reconciliation of the Russian and German peoples carried key importance for the fate of postwar Europe. It stressed that even now the security of the common continent is possible only through joint efforts," it said.
Vladimir Putin also spoke to Merkel about his meeting last week with US President Joe Biden in Geneva.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier laid a wreath in Berlin yesterday to commemorate the victims of the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
Steinmeier laid the wreath at the Soviet War Memorial in Schönholzer Heide in the Berlin district of Pankow. It is estimated the war against the Soviet Union cost roughly 27 million lives, of which 14 million were civilians.
Steinmeier said: "Nobody during this war mourned more victims than the people of the former Soviet Union. And yet these millions are not as deeply etched in our collective memory as their suffering, and our responsibility, demand.”
He added that the German war against the Soviets was carried out with "murderous barbarity.”
More than 13,000 Red Army officers and soldiers who died in the battle for Berlin in 1945 are buried at the Schönholzer Heide memorial, which is one of three large Soviet memorials in the German capital, along with those in Treptow and Tiergarten.
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