Russia accused of Holocaust distortion over ‘Genocide of the Soviet People’ memorial day

New remembrance day created by the Kremlin omits any mention of Jewish Holocaust victims, despite falling on the same date as the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

By ToI Staff 9 January 2026, 3:38 am

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In this pool photograph distributed by the Russian state agency Sputnik, Russia's President Vladimir Putin attends a wreath-laying ceremony at the monument 'Motherland' at the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery in Saint Petersburg, on January 27, 2025, marking the 81st anniversary of the liberation of Leningrad from Nazi blockade in World War Two (Vyacheslav Prokofyev/Pool/ AFP)

Yad Vashem, Israel’s World Holocaust Remembrance Center, accused Russia of Holocaust distortion on Thursday, after Moscow established a new annual memorial day to commemorate the “genocide of the Soviet people” at the hands of the Nazis, without any mention of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law last month designating April 19 as the country’s official annual “Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People.”

The law, signed on December 29, came into effect on January 1, meaning that April 19, 2026, will be the first time that the day is officially observed in Russia.

Yad Vashem, in a statement published Thursday, said that the new Russian memorial day, “while omitting any mention of the heinous crime of the Holocaust perpetrated specifically against the Jewish people, is yet another distortion of history.”

“This new Russian law effectively erases the distinct Jewish dimension of the Shoah, despite the fact that they were the primary target of Nazi genocide,” it said, using the Hebrew term for Holocaust.

“While indeed millions of non-Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union were killed during World War II, many of them in targeted murders, as well as victims from other countries, the Holocaust is defined by the comprehensive campaign aimed at the total eradication…of Jewish existence and the murder of six million Jewish men, women and children, and as such must be recognized and remembered,” the statement continued.

People with Soviet flags arrive for the commemoration ceremony marking the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp at the camp’s memorial site in Buchenwald, near Weimar, eastern Germany, on April 10, 2022. (Jens Schlueter/AFP)

It further noted that April 19, the day selected by Russia as its new memorial day, already has “profound significance in Holocaust remembrance,” as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began on April 19, 1943.

The Russian foreign ministry said last week that the Kremlin had picked April 19 to honor a decree signed by the Soviet Union on April 19, 1943, which “laid the legal foundations for bringing to justice Nazi criminals and their accomplices.”

“Materials collected during investigations conducted on the basis of Decree No. 39 formed a key part of the evidentiary base at the Nuremberg Tribunal, the Khabarovsk Trial, and other judicial proceedings against war criminals from the Axis powers,” the Russian foreign ministry said.

The Soviet Union lost an estimated 27 million people during World War II, around 8.6 million of whom are thought to have been military casualties.

Russia has been accused by Israel in recent years of downplaying the impact of the Holocaust on its Jewish victims.

In 2024, the Kremlin’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, characterized the Holocaust as a mass extermination of “various ethnic and social groups,” and accused Germany of systematically ignoring the plight of non-Jewish European victims, particularly Slavic peoples in the Soviet Union.

In response, Israel said Zakharova’s comments were a “distortion of the Holocaust” and “harmful to victims and survivors.”