Hitler (reproduction)
Hitler (reproduction)Flash 90

An irregular announcement published by the Russian Foreign Ministry blames Britain and France for the rise of Hitler, due to the support of those countries for the ill-fated Munich Agreement.

The statement, reflective of the views of senior officials in the Russian government, came after a ceremony marking 79 years since the signing of the agreement in 1938. The agreement, enabled by European countries such as Britain, France and Italy, allowed Hitler to annex part of Czechoslovakia for the purposes of appeasement, so as to prevent a world war.

"September 30 is one of the darkest days in world history," the ministry's statement began, calling the agreement the "Munich Betrayal,” Newsweek reported, according to the state-run Tass Russian News Agency.

"The heads of the leading Western European countries refused to join forces with the Soviet Union against Nazism and opted instead to appease the aggressor in the hope that this would divert the threat from them and send the German war machine to the East," the statement added.

Stalin’s Soviet Union opposed the agreement, offering to come to Czechoslovakia’s aid on the condition that Poland and Romania allowed Soviet troops to cross their territory, but both countries rejected the condition.

In 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin defended the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of September 1939, which divided Poland between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and pledged peace between the two forces.

"Serious research must show that those were the foreign policy methods then," Putin said in 2014, according to The Telegraph.

"The Soviet Union signed a nonaggression treaty with Germany. People say: 'Ach, that's bad.' But what's bad about that if the Soviet Union didn't want to fight, what's bad about it?" he added.