This is one thing that Western leaders can deny him without any cost.Īndrei Kolesnikov Senior associate and chair of the Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Program at the Carnegie Moscow Centerįive years ago, there was no doubt that Western leaders should attend the Victory Day Parade in Moscow. While Putin claims that Western sanctions can’t influence Russia, he does care about status and legitimacy in the eyes of the world. Furthermore, some of those parading this year might have been involved in the war against Ukraine. Unfortunately, Russia’s May 9 victory parade is not a solemn commemoration of the victims of the war but a celebration of military might. It is also germane to recall that the Nazi-Soviet Pact allowed Adolf Hitler to launch the war and that the Soviet Union shared the spoils in Eastern Europe until it was betrayed by its partner in crime. Leaders of countries that fought Nazi Germany or were occupied by it should not lend credence to such fabrications. The premise of Putin’s propaganda offensive is that Russia is resisting Western-sponsored fascism in Ukraine. His regime is manipulating history by recycling the antifascist narrative to justify war against Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin has used the Great Patriotic War-as the Eastern campaign of World War II is known in Russia-to consolidate Russian identity. Joerg Forbrig Transatlantic fellow for Central and Eastern Europe at the German Marshall Fund of the United States Rather, it should be seen as just a snub for the man in the Kremlin who uses history to justify a new division of Europe into spheres of influence-precisely what victory in World War II was designed to banish from the continent. Shunning the Russian festivities should not be interpreted as an insult to the terrible wartime sacrifices of the Soviet people, or to their contribution to the Allied victory. After Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, however, such hopes have disappeared, as have the reasons for Western leaders to go to Moscow.
They were present not because they accepted his varnished version of history but because they hoped the event would remind Russians that the West could be their partner. In that view, the story of the Soviet-Nazi collaboration that preceded and contributed to the outbreak of World War II is carefully airbrushed out, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 that divided Europe between Hitler and Stalin is deemed a necessity, and the subsequent imposition of Soviet rule over Eastern Europe is defended as a just reward.Įven the tragedy of the estimated millions of ordinary Soviet citizens who may have died unnecessarily during the war due to Stalin’s purges of the Red Army is no longer mentioned, lest it interfere with this officially sanctioned tale of victory.Ī decade ago, many Western leaders attended a similar military parade organized by Putin. Sadly, none of this is true, for what the Russians seek to promote is a blinkered view of history. Piotr Buras Head of the Warsaw Office of the European Council on Foreign Relations But let them not be party to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s belligerent myth-making, and the idea of Moscow as the world capital of antifascism. So let Western leaders commemorate all those who died in the war and the Holocaust, and even pay special honor to the Soviet Union’s millions of dead-many of them Ukrainians and Belarusians. Moscow’s view also overlooks the fact that for Central and Eastern Europe, 1945 brought the imposition of a Communist regime almost as brutal as the Nazi occupation. Second, Western leaders would implicitly endorse a distorted portrait of the Second World War that ignores the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the role of the Soviet Union’s allies in enabling it to keep fighting.
Russia could also claim that attendance indicates agreement with the idea that Russians today are fighting fascism, as their ancestors did in the Great Patriotic War. High-level Western participation in Moscow would imply acceptance of this aggression against a neighbor. First, Russia is occupying Crimea, and Russian forces are fighting alongside rebels in eastern Ukraine. This time, there are both contemporary and historical reasons to stay away.