Putin had told lower house speaker Vyacheslav Volodin to draft a law that would ban the comparisons in public. The law is an amendment to the Russian law that declared victory over Nazi Germany after World War II, according the Moscow Times, a Russian publication.
The decision comes after two years of debate about the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression treaty (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) signed in 1939.The European Union condemned it in 2019, and cited it as one of the impetuses for the war.
However, Putin defended the treaty as recently as 2014. He said it was the country's only option after western countries left it out of alliances, according to the Moscow Times.
"The Soviet army is a liberator, and therefore a benefactor of Europe," Elena Yampolskaya, Committee on Culture chair said in a statement in May obtained by Newsweek. "It is possible and necessary to discuss any specific situations, facts, documents; just not forgetting that the Soviet Union, the Russian people fought the main struggle against the universal evil of Nazism."
Russia and Germany fought together in the beginning of the war. Only after 1941, when Germany invaded Soviet Russia, did they fight against each other.
The Soviet Union also liberated multiple concentration camps, including Auschwitz.
"It is our duty to defend the truth about the victory; otherwise what shall we say to our children if a lie, like a disease, spreads all over the world?" Putin said in a January 2020 speech that Newsweek quoted. "We must set facts against outrageous lies and attempts to distort history. This work is our duty as a winning country and our responsibility to the future generations."
Russia previously banned Nazi symbolism in 2014, according to the Moscow Times.