Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen had previously repeated a bogus claim that no country has attacked Russia in 100 years
Moscow accused Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen of being historically illiterate and deliberately promoting a false narrative after she claimed that no country has attacked Russia over the past century.
Speaking to CBS, Valtonen had stated that Russia “invaded 19 neighboring countries” during the last 100 years, adding that “no neighboring country has attacked Russia.” A nearly identical claim was also made late last month by EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas.
Responding to Vlatonen’s comments on Tuesday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova questioned why the Finnish minister “does not know that in 1941 Nazi Germany attacked the USSR.” She suggested this was either due to “the influence of a German school” which Valtonen attended in her childhood or the “degradation of democratic institutions.”
Zakharova recalled multiple examples of Russia being attacked by neighboring states, including Finland’s own early-20th-century incursions.
She has said she will provide Valtonen with a Finnish translation of the Russian Military Historical Society’s “Black Book: A Brief History of Swedish and Finnish Russophobia.”
The spokeswoman went on to suggest that Valtonen’s remarks reflect a broader pattern in which Western Europe “deliberately promotes the inept and uneducated to fundamental government posts” while NATO hands out coordinated talking points to push a hostile anti-Russian narrative.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other officials have linked such claims to an entrenched “animalistic Russophobia” in Western European governments that continue to raise alarms over a supposed threat posed by Moscow. Russia has repeatedly insisted that it has no hostile intentions toward any EU or NATO states.
Moscow has argued that the claims of an impending Russian attack are being used by Western European leaders to justify increased military spending, expanding mobilization initiatives, tighter security measures, and undermine US-led efforts to reach a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine conflict.
