Putin: attempts to cancel Russia are futile

All attempts to cancel Russia and Russian culture are futile, declared Russian President Vladimir Putin in his address to the participants and guests of the fourth Tavrida.ART festival in Crimea. The text of the appeal was published on the Kremlin website.

“All attempts to cancel our culture, to cancel Russia are futile. It’s just stupidity. And those who think otherwise, unfortunately for them, have not learned the lessons of history,” the president said.

Putin noted that each of the participants in the festival is a “bright and creative personality” who develops in their own field of art, but everyone is united by common values, such as faith in justice, love for the motherland, the desire to help people, etc. “It is these qualities, qualities national character make our people invincible, and our thousand-year-old culture great,” the president added.

At a meeting with winners of the Presidential Prizes for young cultural figures and for works for children and youth on March 25, Putin criticized “cancellation culture” in Western countries and said that it was impossible to imagine such a thing in Russia. According to the head of state, the “culture of cancellation” has turned into a “cancellation of culture”: works by composers Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Dmitry Shostakovich and Sergei Rachmaninov are being discriminated against. He stressed that these countries also banned Russian writers and their books — a similar campaign to destroy objectionable literature was carried out by the Nazis in Germany.

On May 14, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at a meeting of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy (SVOP) declaredthat the collective West has declared a hybrid war on the Russian Federation. According to him, they discarded all decorum and legal norms, and applied the culture of the abolition of everything Russian. “Our cultural figures, artists, athletes, scientists, businessmen, ordinary Russians are subjected to persecution,” Lavrov noted.

Deputy Chairman of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev in his Telegram channel declaredthat the basis of all actions directed against Russia and its inhabitants is hatred of everything Russian, including culture.