What Russian soldiers seize is ours, Putin claims, quoting Hitler

According to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, the missile strike on a Kyiv apartment block on 17 June 2025, which killed 28 civilians and injured well over a hundred others, was “a strike on Ukraine’s military complex”. This was, furthermore, a war that Ukraine had begun and that Russia was trying to end, he claimed.  Putin seldom receives hard-hitting questions like that put by James Jordan from Associated Press on 19 June, but Moscow also claimed that the murder of nine children and eleven adults in its missile strike on a playground and restaurant on 4 April was a strike on a Ukrainian military target’, and this is the standard refrain.  

The lies are astoundingly brazen, yet Putin clearly believes, and probably with cause, that he can get away with it.  Jordan’s second question, after all, prompted Putin to wax lyrical about US President Donald Trump and “restoring relations”.

An official US reaction is, unfortunately, unlikely to comments Putin made the following day, though response from all western countries would be appropriate. It is certainly to be hoped that the comments were noted, not least because, two days before the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of Soviet Ukraine, Putin appeared to cite justification for any act of territorial aggrandizement made in late 1942 by Adolf Hitler. 

Putin was clearly in his element, speaking before the so-called St Petersburg international economic forum.  The latter was, fortunately, still largely ignored by western investors, but was clearly attended by ‘friends’ who knew when to greet Putin’s most shocking pronouncements about Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine with enthusiastic applause. 

It is unclear whether Putin felt emboldened by “developing relations” with the new US administration or by his approving audience, but he did give one standard refrain a particularly cynical twist. “I have already said on many occasions that I consider Russians and Ukrainians, in actual fact, to be one people. In that sense, all of Ukraine is ours.”

In that sense too, Russia is murdering its own children, bombing its own hospitals, schools and residential buildings.  Except, of course, that Russian missile strikes and drone attacks are always claimed to be “against Ukraine’s military complex”, with all evidence to the contrary, however irrefutable, dismissed as fake news. 

Putin went on to essentially say that any territory that Russian soldiers invade becomes “ours”.  He made a token effort to mellow this by claiming to be repeating an “old Russian saying or parable, namely that where the foot of a Russian soldier treads, that is ours.”

In commenting on this, Ukrainian journalist Denis Kazansky pointed out that this was no old Russian saying, but effectively a quote from Adolf Hitler.  It is not quite clear whether the text in Russian is, in fact, a direct translation of Hitler’s words, but certainly quotes the latter as saying: “A German soldier remains where his foot has trod.  You can rest assured that nothing will force us to leave Stalingrad.”

Kazansky is, rightly, scathing also about Putin’s claim that Ukraine must “accept the reality of the situation”.  Russia was forced to retreat from Kherson in 2022, from Sloviansk and Kramatorsk (Donetsk oblast) in 2014,  and has never succeeded in capturing Zaporizhzhia.  Despite this, Russia’s so-called amended ‘constitution’ which Putin pushed through to allow him to remain ‘president’ until at least 2036 claims that four Ukrainian oblasts – Donetsk; Luhansk; Kherson and Zaporizhzhia – are in their entirety ‘Russian territory’. 

There is little point in responding to each lie, when essentially nothing Putin said was true.  His words about Sumy are, however, too threatening to ignore, especially since the claim that Russia needs a so-called ‘buffer zone’ between Russia and Sumy oblast, applies just as much to Kharkiv and Chernihiv oblasts.  Putin asserted that it was not Moscow’s plan to invade and seize Sumy, “but in principle, I do not exclude this.”

In fact, Putin’s responses, applauded by his audience, did not exclude any act of aggression against Ukraine that they can pull off.  Putin used Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk oblast as excuse for its seizure of Ukrainian territory near the border in Sumy oblast.  In fact, having been driven out of Kharkiv oblast in 2022, it has not stopped virtually daily bombing and shelling of both Kharkiv city and the oblast, and trying to claw back the territory which it was able to briefly occupy.  When you claim that “it’s all ours”, while slaughtering and maiming those whom you claim to be your ‘people’, any atrocities and violations of international law are on the cards.