Russia and China mark victory in WW2 as Ukraine war grinds on
MOSCOW: Russia marks the 80th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two on Friday with a military parade attended by China’s Xi Jinping that Moscow fears Ukraine will try to disrupt after three years of devastating war.
President Vladimir Putin, the longest-serving Kremlin chief since Josef Stalin, will speak at a 0700 GMT parade where thousands of Russian soldiers usually march by and drive military hardware such as intercontinental ballistic missiles and tanks past Lenin’s Mausoleum on Red Square.
But the Ukraine war, Europe’s deadliest since World War Two, haunts this celebration. Ukraine attacked Moscow with drones for several days this week, and Moscow and Kyiv accused each other of breaking a 72-hour ceasefire declared by Putin.
The Kremlin says the attendance of Russian allies such as Xi, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and several dozen leaders from the former Soviet Union, Africa, Asia and Latin America shows Russia is not isolated even if Moscow’s former WW2 Western allies want to stay away. From Europe, the leaders of Serbia and Slovakia will attend.
“The victory over fascism, achieved at the cost of enormous sacrifices, has an everlasting significance,” Putin told Xi in the Kremlin. “The countless sacrifices made by both our peoples should never be forgotten.”
The Soviet Union lost 27 million people in World War Two, including many millions in Ukraine, but pushed Nazi forces back to Berlin, where Adolf Hitler committed suicide and the red Soviet Victory Banner was raised over the Reichstag in 1945.
For Russians – and for many of the peoples of the former Soviet Union – May 9 is the most sacred date in the calendar, and Putin, angry at what he says are attempts by the West to belittle the Soviet victory, has sought to use memories of WW2 to unite Russian society.
Chinese Communist Party historians say China’s casualties in the 1937-1945 Second Sino-Japanese War were 35 million. The Japanese occupation caused the displacement of as many as 100 million Chinese people and significant economic hardship, as well as the horrific 1937 Nanjing Massacre, during which an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 victims were killed.
Moscow and Kyiv do not publish accurate casualty numbers for the war in Ukraine, though U.S. President Donald Trump, who says he wants peace, says hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides have been killed and injured.