Russia's parliamentary leader Vyacheslav Volodin warns West of a third world war

Russian parliamentary leader Vyacheslav Volodin has evoked the danger of a third world war on the 80th anniversary of the end of the siege of Leningrad.

"Fascist ideology has become the norm for the leadership of NATO countries," Volodin wrote on his Telegram channel on Saturday.

He accused Western governments, including explicitly the German government led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz, of supporting a policy of genocide in Ukraine. "This is a dangerous path that could lead to a new world war," Volodin said.

Russia's main justification for its war against Ukraine, which has been going on for almost two years, is the claim that the neighbouring country needs to be "de-Nazified."

Russian President Vladimir Putin repeatedly uses historical comparisons with World War II to justify his attack on the neighbouring country.

He equates the invasion of Ukraine that he ordered with the Soviet Union's defence against Nazi Germany's criminal war of aggression. Especially on anniversaries, Moscow uses the argument of "defending the memory of the war dead" for its war propaganda.

Exactly 80 years ago, on January 27, 1944, Soviet troops broke through the German Wehrmacht's siege ring around what was then Leningrad, now St Petersburg.

Before this, German troops had deliberately caused the deaths of an estimated 1.2 million people, who died from bombing, hunger and cold.

Germany's ambassador in Moscow, Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, characterized the blockade as "a particularly shocking and brutal war crime in the midst of the criminal invasion of the Soviet Union."