Putin has 'sick megalomania', says Auschwitz director

The director of the Auschwitz memorial appeared to liken Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler during commemorations marking the anniversary of the death camp’s liberation.

"Similar sick megalomania, similar lust for power, and similar-sounding myths about uniqueness, greatness, primacy ... only written in Russian. Innocent people are dying en masse in Europe, again," Piotr Cywinski said, in an address to an audience including Holocaust survivors.

"Wola district in Warsaw, Zamojszczyzna, Oradour and Lidice today are called Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel, Mariupol and Donetsk," he added, referring to places where mass killings took place during the Second World War and sites where Ukraine and its allies accuse Russian forces of committing atrocities.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial preserves the Auschwitz death camp set up on Polish soil by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. More than 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, perished at the camp.

The camp was liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945. Russia was not invited to take part in this year's commemorations due to the war in Ukraine.

It came as Mateusz Morawiecki, the Polish prime minister, on Friday accused Putin of building "new camps" while waging war against Ukraine.

"On the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi German death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, let us remember that to the east Putin is building new camps," he said on Facebook, without elaborating.

In Kyiv, president Volodymyr Zelensky and foreign diplomats attended a ceremony to mark Holocaust Memorial Day at Babyn Yar, a woodland on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital where the Nazis massacred tens of thousands of Jews in 1941.

"Today we repeat even more weightily than before: never again – hatred; never again – indifference. The more peoples of the world overcome indifference, the less space in the world will remain for hatred," he said after laying a lantern at the memorial marking the site.

Nazi firing squads murdered about 900,000 Ukrainian Jews at sites across the country during the Second World War. The memorial marking a 1941-1942 massacre on the outskirts of Kharkiv was badly damaged by Russian shelling during the assault on the city in March.

The Russian president on Friday repeated his claim that neo-Nazis were committing crimes in Ukraine - an allegation Moscow uses to justify its military intervention.

"Forgetting the lessons of history leads to the repetition of terrible tragedies," he said.