“Perpetuating Russian myths about WW2 is currently costing ordinary Ukrainians their lives, ordinary Russians their future, and the rest of the world its security”
President of Ukrainian Society of Switzerland Andrej Lushnycky dispels the myths of Russian propaganda about World War II in his article for the Atlantic Council.
According to him, the Allied powers’ tolerance of the glorification, and to some extent, the appropriation of the Soviet Union’s, and now Russia’s, role as the ‘victors’ of the Second World War has contributed to the reinforcement of the most powerful, and dogmatic, ideological weapon in their propaganda arsenal, Victory Day — May 9.
“It is important to remember, and to remind Mr. Putin and his followers, that the Western allied nations were armies of liberation that brought democracy and long-term stability to Europe, while the Soviet army was an army of occupation that enslaved hundreds of millions behind the Iron Curtain,” he stressed.
Andrej Lushnycky claims that every great nation needs to question its past, but the Russian Federation, under Vladimir Putin, not only avoids doing so but is engaged in the opposite, i.e., glorifying its most shameful periods.
In Russian rhetoric about the war there is no mention of the lend-lease act from the US, Andrej Lushnycky says. That gave the desperate Soviet Union close to $160 billion (in current dollar terms) in weapons at the time, nor the countless soldiers from all the Soviet republics sent to the front without equipment as cannon fodder.
“Conveniently forgotten is the systematic mass rape of German women by the Soviet troops at the end of the war too. Regrettably and predictably, so many of these ignored elements of war crimes have shamefully reappeared in the comportment of the Russian troops in Ukraine today,” stresses Andrej Lushnycky.
Andrej Lushnycky also criticizes big parades of military hardware, which the Kremlin holds on May 9. In his opinion, these parades project weakness but not strength and are only a grandiose distraction and not a solemn.
“In allowing for the partition of Europe, the West sanctioned the triumph of one authoritarian system over another. This lack of courage and vision on the part of western leaders, at the time, was an act of betrayal of our values, of our beliefs, and of our sense of dignity and humanity. In 2022, in Ukraine, the world cannot afford for this to happen again,” Andrej Lushnycky concludes.
