Historian Evgeny Spitsyn on TV threatens another participant of the talk with prison term for "falsification of history" when the latter mentioned Soviet invasions on Finland and Poland. Spitsyn argues that USSR did not invade Finland on 30 November 1939 but "was provoked", referring to shelling of Mainila, a false flag operation which USSR used as a casus belli to start the war. League of Nations recognised this invasion as illegal and expelled USSR in response, but the narrative where it was USSR that was "invaded" and "merely responded" was the official and the only allowed one in Soviet historiography. In case of Poland, Soviets invaded on 17 September 1939, shortly after German invasion, and by attacking from the East, they effectively helped Germans suppress any remaining resistance of the Polish army, started warm cooperation between Gestapo and NKVD in suppressing Polish resistance and commercial cooperation in bypassing Allied economic blockade of the Third Reich. Interestingly, in spite of overwhelming evidence including Soviet-Nazi parades in Moscow, Russian government denies any collaboration between USSR and Nazi Germany, dismissing the documented cases of cooperation as "tactical", "irrelevant" etc.

Since 2014 Russian Criminal Code also introduced article 354.1 which makes it illegal to "falsify history", which what Spitsyn refers to. The article has interesting wording, because it's titled "Rehabilitation of Nazism" but nowhere in the actual legal text includes the word "Nazism". Instead, the convoluted wording makes it a crime to "negate facts established by the ruling of the International Military Tribunal" but also "distributing knowingly false facts of activities of the USSR in the period of WW2 as well as about veterans of the Great Patriotic War". The article is intentionally vaguely worded - Russian courts have been using article 354.1 as a blanket ban on any debate or mentions of Soviet-Nazi cooperation, and Russian citizens were actually sentenced based on this law. As an additional pressure point, for the general public the perpetrators were sentenced for "Rehabilitation of Nazism" - because this is the article's title - even if they condemned Nazi and Soviet invasion. Also note that Russian historiography distinguishes the Great Patriotic War, which is the period of WW2 which only started when Germany invaded its former ally in 1941, from World War 2, which is a rarely used term for the war that started in 1939 from Nazi-Soviet invasion on Poland. The law therefore covers two periods: "activities of the USSR during WW2", which includes invasion on Poland, Finland or Katyn massacres (1940) - all of which can be prosecuted - and "veterans of the Great Patriotic War" (from 1941), because, apparently, since USSR did not participate in any war in 1939, there couldn't be any veterans.