Feb 22 – Ottawa. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress is expressing concern about the film “T-34” being screened in Canada at Cineplex theatres.
The T34 tank was the weapon used by the Soviet Union to keep captive the peoples of Eastern Europe for four decades. Together with its Nazi German ally, at the beginning of WWII, the Soviet regime invaded and subjugated eastern Poland, the Baltic States and several other independent east European states.
As Soviet forces rolled west on T-34 tanks in the second half of World War II, they systematically committed myriad war crimes, crimes against humanity, mass rape, extrajudicial murder and ethnic cleansing. Soviet tanks were subsequently used to brutally suppress uprisings for freedom in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
That the current Russian regime, which funded this film, seeks to pay homage to this murderous history, speaks only to its own embrace of imperialism, aggression and belligerence.
