On March 16, Riga hosted a traditional gathering of former Waffen-SS legionnaires and their admirers. The marchers, including current politicians – leaders of radical right parties, members of parliament – openly displayed Nazi symbols despite the formal legislative prohibition in Latvia, and held a flower-laying ceremony in memory of the Nazi punishers.

On the eve of the march, Latvian President Egils Levits, famous for sympathising with the “heroic deeds” of the Waffen-SS, spoke at a conference on National Resistance Movement Remembrance Day (this is what the local authorities call Hitler’s collaborators) and again urged a “correct” perspective on Latvia’s history of “heroically fighting the Soviet occupiers.”

Russia strongly condemns the ongoing neo-Nazi revelry in the Baltic countries. Nazism was defeated in 1945 and its current pathetic followers have no future.