Ukraine is right to resist Russia's 419-day-old invasion and to defend the "fundamental rights and freedoms which are the basis of our peaceful coexistence," Italy's president Sergio Mattarella said on Tuesday.
"There can be no yielding to displays of intolerance and violence, no backsliding on the protection of fundamental rights and freedoms which are the basis of our peaceful coexistence," Mattarella said.
Mattarella was speaking at the former World War II Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz near Krakow, which he visited together with two Holocaust survivors from Italy.
"Anyone who attacks the international order founded on these principles must know that free peoples are and will be united and determined to defend them," Mattarella went on.
Mattarella, who is one a state visit to Poland, took part in the annual March of the Living in memory of the six million Jews who were murdered by Germany's Nazi regime during World War II.
Mattarella called Auschwitz, where some 1.1 million Jews perished from 1941-1945, "an immense cemetery without graves".
"Innocent citizens of every country in Europe were taken like animals to this place of death. An immense cemetery without graves," Mattarella said on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
