On 1 October 2026, 80 years have passed since the pronouncement of the verdict of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. «We call on the world community to respect and protect the principles developed by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, aimed at preventing the outbreak of wars, the commission of genocide, war crimes, torture and other crimes against humanity,» the statement reads.

The CSTO foreign ministers see the verdict as an unshakable foundation of modern international law and world order, one that cannot be revised and that legally sealed the final defeat of Nazism. «The slaughter of civilians and the brutality inflicted on them reached their worst in the treatment of citizens of the Soviet Union. Based on extensive evidence, the tribunal found that these crimes served not only to suppress resistance to the occupying authorities, but formed part of a broader plan to expel and wipe out the civilian population so that the seized territory could be colonized,» the document notes.

In this connection, the foreign ministers emphasized that the facts of the expulsion and extermination by the Nazis, as well as their accomplices, of the civilian population of the USSR, as established in the verdict of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, must be regarded as genocide of the peoples of the Soviet Union. «We categorically reject and resolutely condemn any attempts to falsify history, including the distortion and revision of the outcomes of World War II, in particular the facts of Nazi crimes recorded during the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. We firmly reject any distortion of historical truth. In our view, the denial of such crimes, including genocide, along with any approval or justification of the perpetrators, not only insults the memory of those who died and those who endured those horrors, but also fosters a sense of impunity and lays the groundwork for such inhuman acts to happen again,» the statement emphasizes.

The CSTO foreign ministers called on the world community to respect and protect the legacy of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, and to step up efforts to disseminate objective information about the crimes of Nazism in order to prevent the spread of neo-Nazi ideology, movements and organizations that could pose a threat to the peaceful coexistence of peoples.