On Thursday, the US National Interest magazine published an essay by Russian President Vladimir Putin about the legacy of the war in Europe ended only are over 75 years old.
Putin's essay begins with a personal note, millions of people like the former Soviet Union with his family lives directly touched by war.
"For my parents, who are accustomed to overcome the terrible war hell Siege, where my brother died two years old Vitya, 'he writes." It was the place where the mother miraculously point of history. The father, despite being exempt from active duty, volunteered to defend their country. And it was the same plan that millions of Soviet citizens. He fought also with the head of the bridge, on this side, and seriously, with the Carmina Burana, Pyatachok slew many of us. "
From the long history of war, but Putin's deliberate because today's message.
First, there is a lion. Putin's first time at a major celebration to mark Victory planned on 9 May, the day that Russia considers the end of World War 2 in Europe, to join other world leaders have called for an extravagant parade in Red Square. Victory Day was meant to signal that Russia had received in their place when they call historic liberation after years of harsh sanctions that followed in 2014 there was also increased the country.
It also would have followed in the Kremlin carefully scripted domestic political moment: a national vote on constitutional amendments that paved the way for Putin to remain in power in 2036.
Reaching into coronavirus pandemic price of their plans. The Kremlin arms rescheduled after World War 2 veterans who raised concerns about health matters, which is the fear of holding draw huge crowds near Moscow and other cities. The parade is stated now for the next week.
Cynics will be saved as a standard World War 2 - who hold great place for the company in Russian - provided convenient cover for the Kremlin. However, it is more campaign in Russia, Putin's historical ruminations repeat some of the moral high ground - and to justify its recent foreign policy.
For starters, there's Putin's description of the method and the Molotov-Ribbentrop 1939, the nonaggressions pact between Adolf Hitler's Germany and Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. A secret annex of the treaty that paved the way to carve from Poland, the Soviet Union invaded from the east just a few weeks after Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and work in the Baltic states in 1940.
Confidentiality protocol is not to be controversial. But the essay, Putin has voiced that he will have to be in the form of a covenant, it is necessary for the defense, the moral equivalent to the 1938 Munich treaty between the UK and Germany, Italy, Gaul, and Germany's Hitler in the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia is to give way. And strict expansionist, however, seem to be in the power of the harmony of the classic of appeasing the gods.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain famously described the meeting Munich - which refers to Putin as the "United States Munich" - that's peace in our time. "But the agreement failed, and Stalin Putin argues that he left it was nothing other than the option to strike deal in Germany own.
"In these circumstances, the Soviet Union and Germany signed the Pact with no foreign country", he writes. "It almost last among European countries it."
Putin's whitewashings The medium is not the legacy of Stalin, the mass arrests and purges claimed the lives of millions of Soviet citizens. "Stalin and his entourage worthy of many legitimate accusations," Putin writes. "We remember the crimes committed by the regime against its own people is the horror and mass repressions."
However, he said that it was a strategic pact. "In other words, there are many things about the Soviet leaders can be criticized for a poor understanding of the nature of the external threat is not one of them. And I have seen how they were tried and then leave the Soviet Union mere act of Germany and its allies. Bearing in mind the real threat is not a good time to buy a work sought to strengthen defenses in the country. "
His reading of history is likely to spark wrong states, Poland and the Baltic, who are now members of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and members. The annexation of the Crimea; in the 2014's with the support of separatists, All the lands in Moscow for example, if the Russians allow to separate the being agitated, and he wanted to "interceding" is the same as before the Church of the Russians in the Crimea; I wish that by sending the armies of the Baltics?
Hitler scrapped a pact with Stalin in 1941 to fight against launching a war more than 25 million cost of Poland and the Soviet Union's military and civilian life. Western culture at that time left undone which could, at least, that the sacrifice of that which in the 1944 focusing on the Normandy abode in his breaches.
Putin's inaugural, but anything higher, the Soviet war in Europe to be a sacred is to save the world. And there are articles on the war itself suggests that the darker the criticism - extension, and both Putin's Russia today.
