![]() In Moscow it was already 9 May, which became the Soviet Union’s “Victory Day” in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45. on, marked as “Victory in Europe Day” by France, Britain and the United States. Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender came into force at 11:01 p.m. They deny Putin’s claim that the expansion of the NATO alliance to Russia’s borders poses a threat to its security or justifies Moscow’s invasion.Īs many as 354,000 Russian and Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or injured in the Ukraine war, which is now in its 15th month and could well grind on well beyond 2023, according to a trove of purported US intelligence documents posted online. Kyiv and its allies accuse Putin of waging an unprovoked war of aggression in Ukraine to seize land. The Soviet Union lost 27 million people in World War Two, including many millions in Ukraine, but eventually pushed Nazi forces back to Berlin, where Hitler committed suicide and the red Soviet Victory Banner was raised over the Reichstag in 1945. A single tank took part – a T-34, a type used in World War Two. Putin cheered for “Russia, for our valiant Armed Forces, for victory!”Ĭheers rang out across Red Square, with a gun salute and the Russian national anthem, though with a much curtailed show of military hardware – and no aviation. Everyone is ready to help, praying for you,” he said of those taking part in what the Kremlin calls a “special military operation”. “The whole country rallied to support our heroes. ![]() Putin hailed Russian forces in Ukraine as heroes who were fighting for the country’s future against a West which, he said, had forgotten the decisive role played by the Soviet Union in defeating Nazi Germany. The West’s goal, Putin said, “is to achieve the collapse and destruction of our country, cross out the results of the Second World War, finally break the system of global security and international law, and strangle any sovereign centers of development”. In Putin’s words, “in a number of countries, memorials to Soviet soldiers are ruthlessly and cold-bloodedly destroyed”, thus “a real cult of the Nazis and their accomplices” being created. ![]() “They seem to have forgotten what the insane claims of the Nazis for world domination led to”, he went further. “We believe that any ideology of superiority is inherently disgusting, criminal and deadly”, Putin said according to the Kremlin transcript, adding that “Western globalist elites still talk about their exclusivity”, provoking “bloody conflicts, hatred, Russophobia”, “destroying family, traditional values that make a person a person”. “A real war has again been unleashed against our homeland,” he said. “The decisive battles for the fate of our Motherland have always become patriotic, all-national and sacred,” the 70-year-old president told veterans and soldiers assembled on Red Square for the annual Victory Day parade. Putin has repeatedly likened the war in Ukraine – which he casts as a defensive move against a West which wants to carve up Russia – to the challenge Moscow faced when Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. In a lackluster Victory Day speech on Tuesday (9 May), President Vladimir Putin blamed the West for what he said was an “ideology of superiority” which he compared to the Nazi claims for world domination.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |