President Vladimir Putin has hit back at claims that Russia was largely to blame for the policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany, claiming European nations “want to shift the blame” for the cause of the Second World War.

The Russian leader strongly criticised a recent resolution by the European Parliament which blamed the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union for the outbreak of war in Europe, during a meeting of ex-Soviet nation leaders called the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council.

Mr Putin argued that the Soviet Union’s pact followed a string of agreements Germany had made with Britain, France and Poland, as part of their policy of appeasement towards Hitler through the 1930s.

He insisted that those deals, including the 1938 Munich pact that allowed for the annexation of Czechoslovakia, emboldened the Nazis.

“The Soviet Union was the last to sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler,” Mr Putin said at the meeting in St Petersburg.

“They want to shift the blame for unleashing World War II from the Nazis to Communists,” he claimed, according to AP .

“Those Red Army soldiers were simple people – workers and farmers – and many of them suffered from Stalin’s regime.

“These people sacrificed their lives to free Europe from the Nazis, and now they tear down monuments to them. They do it to cover up what effectively was a collusion of European leaders with Hitler.”

Two weeks after the Nazis invaded Poland, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. Hitler and Stalin carved up Poland and Baltic states based on a secret protocol in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

The pact with the Soviet Union was broken by the Nazi invasion of 1941.