Russian President Vladimir Putin will lead celebrations for the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany on Monday, as Russian forces battle Ukrainians in one of the deadliest European conflicts since the end of World War II 77 years ago. years old.
Putin, Russia’s supreme leader since 1999, has in recent years used Victory Day to spear the West from a rostrum on Red Square before a parade of troops, tanks, rockets and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
A pass over St Basil’s Cathedral’s nine domes will include supersonic fighter jets, strategic bombers and, for the first time since 2010, the Il-80 “doomsday” command plane, which would carry Russia’s top echelon in the event of a nuclear attack.
Putin has repeatedly compared the war in Ukraine – which he describes as a battle against dangerous “Nazi” nationalists – to the challenge the Soviet Union faced when Adolf Hitler invaded in 1941.
“Our common duty is to prevent the revival of Nazism, which brought so much suffering to people of different countries,” Putin said in a message to the people of 12 former Soviet republics, including Ukraine and Georgia.
Ukraine and its allies reject the accusation of Nazism in Ukraine and that Russia is fighting for survival against an aggressive West, saying the Kremlin leader has unleashed an unprovoked war in an attempt to rebuild the Soviet Union.
Putin, who has repeatedly expressed resentment over the way the West treated Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, says Ukraine has been used by the United States to threaten his country.
US President Joe Biden has called Putin’s invasion of Ukraine a struggle in a much broader global battle between democracy and autocracy and has repeatedly called Putin a war criminal. In a speech in Warsaw in March, Biden said the former KGB spy could not remain in power.
Russia denies Ukrainian and Western accusations that its forces have committed war crimes since the February 24 invasion.
The Soviet Union lost 27 million people in World War II, including millions in Ukraine, but ended up pushing Nazi forces back to Berlin, where Hitler committed suicide and the red flag of Soviet victory was raised over the Reichstag in 1945.
Next to the defeat of French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte in 1812, the defeat of Nazi Germany is the Russians’ most revered military triumph, although both catastrophic invasions from the west left Russia deeply sensitive about its western borders.
Victory Day is an almost sacred holiday for Russians, as most Soviet families mourn the losses. For Russians, the collective memory of the war is one of the few uncontroversial events in a tumultuous history divided by disputes.
While Putin has tried to stem the decline of Russia’s once-mighty military, the conflict in Ukraine has illustrated the weakness of the country’s military. The losses are not publicly disclosed, but Ukraine says Russian losses are worse than the 15,000 Soviet dead in the 1979-1989 Soviet-Afghan war.
Source: CNN Brasil
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