Crisis in Ukraine clear example of ignoring world war lessons - Naryshkin
MOSCOW. July 15 (Interfax) - Forgetting the lesson of world wars is destructive, especially due to events in Ukraine, Russian State Duma Speaker Sergei Naryshkin said.
"Forgetting lessons of such global clashes as world wars could play a nasty trick on us and the crisis in Ukraine, civil war and humanitarian catastrophe is a clear example of this," Naryshkin said on Tuesday at a meeting of the organizing committee to prepare events dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the World War I.
Establishing Ukraine as a sovereign state "can be considered one of the consequences of World War I," he said.
"This was a short but very wild stage of so-called independence and back then it already showed the entire danger of aggressive nationalism, by the way, Mikhail Bulgakov wrote a lot about this, and it wouldn't be excessive to remember this now due to the most acute Ukrainian crisis," Naryshkin said.
Following the organizing committee meeting, a website database of a digitalized German military World War I archive was presented. It had been moved to Russia as a result of World War II, moved to Russia as a result of World War II. This project is the result of joint work by the German Historical Institute in Moscow, the Russian Historical Society and the Russian Defense Ministry, the speaker said.
"Such experience of joint work is important not for scientific community, our two states, politicians of Germany and Russia as well as European politicians," Naryshkin said.
