GDANSK (Poland), Sept 1 All pacts that European states agreed with Nazi Germany in 1934-39 were “morally unacceptable,” including the 1939 Nazi-Soviet accord, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday.

“All attempts to appease the Nazis between 1934 and 1939 through various agreements and pacts were morally unacceptable and politically senseless, harmful and dangerous,” Putin said.

“We must admit these mistakes. Our country has done this. The Russian parliament has condemned the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. We have a right to expect this from other countries that also agreed deals with the Nazis.”

Putin appeared to be referring to various deals, including the 1938 Munich agreement in which Britain and France told Nazi Germany they would not object to its annexation of parts of the former Czechoslovakia.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed on August 23, 1939, was a non-aggression agreement between Adolf Hitler's Germany and Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union in which the two countries also secretly agreed to carve up Poland.

It led to the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, widely regarded as the start of World War II.

Putin was speaking at a ceremony in Gdansk, in northern Poland, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the invasion.

The Russian premier also slammed the “falsification” of history, a term that Moscow has used to describe efforts to challenge the narrative of Soviet heroism in World War II.

“We need to rid society from the plague of xenophobia, racial hatred, mutual distrust built on the cynical distortion or crude falsification of history,” Putin said.

“I am convinced that only in this way will we be able to turn the page on World War II for a peaceful future for our children.” He stressed Russia's immense losses in the war, noting that 600,000 Soviet war dead were buried in Poland alone.

Tens of millions of Russians died after Hitler betrayed Stalin and ordered Nazi forces to invade the Soviet Union in 1941.

“Of the 55 million people who died (in World War II), more than half — more than half — were citizens of the Soviet Union. Think about this frightening number,” Putin said.

At a press conference earlier on Tuesday, Putin described the Munich agreement, as well as a 1934 German-Polish deal and Poland's participation in the 1938 dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, as mistakes that led to World War II.

“There were a huge number of mistaken steps made by many sides. All these actions together allowed the massive aggression by Nazi Germany,” Putin said at a joint press conference with his Polish counterpart Donald Tusk.

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and less than three weeks later Soviet forces occupied eastern Poland. The Nazis and Soviets were allies until 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

Underscoring Polish bitterness about the Soviet attack on Poland, Polish President Lech Kaczynski brought it up at another ceremony earlier in the day.

“Bolshevik Russia stuck a knife in the back of Poland,” Kaczynski said.

East European countries have bitterly criticised the Nazi-Soviet pact and consider the Soviet Union a wartime aggressor -- a stance that enrages Russia, which suffered immense losses and views its role in the war as heroic.

In Moscow on Tuesday, top Russian officials pushed back against efforts to paint the Soviet Union as the mirror image of Nazi evil.

“Even during the Cold War no-one ever tried to put the Nazi regime on one level with the Stalin dictatorship,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an interview published in the Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily.

“It never occurred to anyone to equate the Nazi threat — which meant the annihilation of whole peoples — and the politics of the Soviet Union, which was the only force able to resist the war machine of Hitler's Germany.” —AFP