In memory of Great Victory: No one forgotten, nothing forgotten

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OPINION

By HE Vladlen Semivolos

May 9, 2025, marks the 80th anniversary of the outstanding victory of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War. For us, this is a sacred date, forever inscribed in the glorious history of the Fatherland. On this very day, we will traditionally honour all those who crushed the fascist death machine, forged victory in the rear, and defended the freedom and independence of our Motherland. All those who sacrificed themselves so that life could continue on earth.

The Soviet people were destined to engage in mortal combat with a cynical and cruel enemy - the Nazi regime and its European accomplices, who treacherously invaded the USSR with plans for its dismemberment and plunder, misanthropic ideas of total enslavement and extermination of the state's population. 300 million residents and the entire industry of Europe worked for the aggressors. Their plan on a planetary scale was to crush and destroy our country as the main obstacle standing in the way of conquering world domination and establishing a universal slave and colonial order.

There were many of Hitler's friends in the ranks of the German army. Almost all of the so-called civilised Europe came to our land to rob and kill.

Romanians, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Italians, Croats, Dutch, Finns, Belgians, Luxembourgers, Danes, Spaniards, Norwegians, Swedes and others fought in the crusade against the Soviet Union together with the Nazis.

France also fielded 20 land divisions against the Soviet Union - about 200 thousand soldiers and officers. The Red Army alone took over 23,000 French prisoners, and many French were killed on the battlefield. The same inglorious fate befell the majority of the invaders, who found their last refuge in the vast expanses of our Motherland.

Having demonstrated outstanding heroism, having endured the most difficult trials at the front and in the rear, our people stood firm with honor and routed the enemy, breaking the back of the Nazi barbarians. The victory cost us colossal losses - 27 million residents of the USSR fell victim to the war, over 11.5 million Red Army soldiers fell on the battlefield.

The invaders committed monstrous acts of genocide on our land: 7.5 million people died at their hands - old people, women, children. They burned 1,710 cities, destroyed tens of thousands of villages, industrial enterprises, hospitals, schools. During the 900 days of the blockade, about a million people out of three million residents of Leningrad died. The number of cultural and historical values ​​lost in the fire of war and stolen from us by the fascists cannot be counted. There is not a single family in our country that has not been scorched by the grief of war.

The "death camps" - Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor - were the sinister symbols of Nazi atrocities. More than three million of our prisoners of war were tortured there by German executioners and their henchmen.

They were tortured at hard labour, starved, gassed, used for inhuman experiments, and burned alive. After walking through the territory of Auschwitz, Major General Fyodor Krasavin, whose division liberated this camp, experienced such a powerful shock that by the morning of the next day, his hair had turned completely grey.

For our people, the victory over Eurofascism, the most terrible force that has ever threatened humanity, is a Great Victory. The successes of the Red Army in the fight against Nazism became a decisive factor for the development of the Resistance movement, the opening of the second front by the allies, the consolidation of progressive humanity against a common enemy. And today our victory remains one of the main unifying principles for the peoples of the former USSR, a moral guide for the post-war generations.

Russian President V.V. Putin declared 2025 the year of the 80th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War, the Year of Peace and Unity in the Fight against Nazism. The countries of the world must not forget at what price the Victory was won, and prevent a new global war.

We will resolutely oppose any attempts to rewrite history, revise the results of the Second World War, or belittle the glorious feat of the Soviet soldier who saved humanity from the "brown plague".

The world must remember that it was the Soviet people who paid the highest price for the victory over Germany and its cronies. It was the Red Army that crushed the enemy's main forces in the battles near Moscow, in the Battle of Stalingrad, and on the Kursk Bulge. It was the Soviet soldier-liberator who raised the banner of Victory over the Reichstag, which had fallen under the onslaught of the Red Army, and accepted the unconditional surrender of the "Third Reich". It was this historical event that marked the final fall of Nazism.

Today, the need to convey to the international community the truth about the Great Patriotic War, about the decisive role of the peoples of the Soviet Union in the defeat of German Nazism is more relevant than ever. Precisely because the misanthropic ideology and barbaric Nazi practices have once again raised their heads in Europe.

The EU's Brussels and a number of rabidly Russophobic EU countries are leading the attempts to revive Nazism, providing unconditional support to the Nazi regime in Kyiv, which, as its leader publicly admits, is driven by hatred of everything Russian. The EU has become the ideological mentor of Ukrainian neo-Nazis.

The neo-Nazis who seized power in Kyiv in February 2014 as a result of an unconstitutional coup orchestrated by the West, behave in exactly the same way as their ideological "inspirers" - Hitler's executioners. The criminal Kiev regime crushes people with tanks, burns people alive, as happened in Odessa, Mariupol. When Russian troops liberated cities in the Kursk region, numerous facts of crimes by Ukrainian servicemen against unarmed civilians were revealed.

Western politicians do not notice the swastikas, skulls and other Nazi stylistics of Ukrainian militants, their atrocities against civilians and Russian servicemen. With the complicity of the Russophobic "collective West", the criminals are drunk with their impunity. For us, they are the direct heirs of Hitler's executioners.

Over the past decades, with the support of the West, hatred of Russia has been instilled in Ukrainian youth, textbooks have been falsified, and neo-Nazis have merged with the government. Radicals have fought history, desecrated and destroyed memorials to Red Army soldiers and renamed streets named after those who liberated Ukraine from the fascist invaders in honor of Nazi accomplices. They have banned the Orthodox Church, Russian culture, the Russian language, and are calling on TV screens to beat up their children for speaking Russian. The West has created an anti-Russia out of Ukraine, permeated with Nazi ideals.

Russophobic Europe has always considered us as an eternal enemy. This was the case under Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great.

For centuries, European countries have tried to conquer and destroy Russia. But each time they suffered defeat - we defeated Napoleon's army, stopped the foreign military intervention of the Triple Alliance in 1918-1922, destroyed the hordes of Eurofascists in World War II, who had gathered to march against us under Hitler's banners.

Today, in alliance with the Kyiv regime, Europe again dreams of taking revenge - to inflict a "strategic defeat" on Russia. We are well aware that in this "war to the last Ukrainian", the hot phase of which began with the coup d'etat in Kyiv in 2014, they will use all available forces and means. Western countries, which, like under Napoleon and Hitler, are once again standing on our border, supplying the Kyiv junta with weapons, and fighting against us on the side of Ukrainian militants. Since the beginning of the Ukronazi invasion of the Kursk region alone, we have destroyed almost 5,000 foreign soldiers - almost two thousand Poles, 1,230 Georgians, about a thousand Colombians, more than 200 French, about the same number of Germans, 150 British, and 90 Americans.

Now in Europe, they are openly discussing the introduction of the so-called "peacekeeping contingent" of NATO countries into Ukraine.

Let us be honest, whatever forces come to the conflict zone under whatever guise, they will become a legitimate military target for us.

As Alexander Nevsky, the author of the outstanding victory of Russian arms over the German knights of the Livonian Order in April 1242 on Lake Peipus, said: "Whoever comes to us with a sword will perish by the sword."

And let no one have the slightest doubt: all the goals of our military operation will be achieved - complete denazification and demilitarisation of Ukraine, protection of the rights and interests of the Russian population in this country, ensuring the strategic security of our western borders. We destroyed the Nazi hydra 80 years ago, we will crush it again.

Russia was, is and will be victorious!

The writer is the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Russian Federation to the Republic of Uganda and the Republic of South Sudan