The Russian leader visited Mariupol on Saturday, a day after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest over alleged war crimes.
A Ukrainian official likened Russian President Vladimir Putin to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler for visiting the scene of his crimes in Mariupol, one of the cities heavily destroyed in Ukraine since the war began last February.
„Another dictator also visited Mariupol once. We know how his story ended. ????: Hitler visiting Army Group South HQ at Mariupol, Ukraine in December 1941. ‚Many historians and contemporaries claim that it was here that Hitler first realized the war was lost‘ – WarHistoryOnline,“ Anton Gerashchenko, adviser to the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, wrote on Twitter on Sunday.
Mariupol, a strategic seaport along the Azov Sea, was seized during the Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine in World War II from 1941 to 1943. The city was severely damaged at that time in which Nazi Germany also invaded Leningrad, now called St. Petersburg, and killed as many as 1 million Russians, blocked citizens from leaving, and let hundreds of thousands starve to death, according to a report last April by the U.S. Embassy in Georgia.
Eighty years have passed since the Nazi occupation of Mariupol, but the city has yet again experienced similar abuses when Putin’s forces launched heavy offensives last year and left thousands of residents without food, water, and utilities.
