While most of the democratic world solemnly marks VE Day, as the Victory in Europe Day and end of World War II on May 8, the Kremlin will again stage its annual May 9 military parade across Red Square. It is a performance designed not to commemorate, but to control a false narrative.
Russia does not honor the truth on that day. It has weaponized history.
The world remembers May 8, 1945, as Victory in Europe Day. It was the formal surrender of Nazi Germany and the end of the deadliest conflict in human history. But in Russia, recognition of the official end date is behind by one day.
It was nearly midnight in Moscow when Germany’s surrender took effect, and under Stalin’s orders, the Soviet Union declared victory on May 9 instead. Since then, the date has served not just as a day of remembrance but as a cornerstone of Russian national identity. Increasingly, it has also served as a platform for propaganda.
For Ukraine, the historical split over dates is not a technicality. It is a political fault line.
2025 year marks the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazism. In Kyiv, Ukrainian officials prepared ceremonies on May 8 to honor the sacrifice of millions. But they are also issuing a sharp warning: the Kremlin’s May 9 parade is a grotesque distortion of history. It is a powerful statement, especially while Russian forces continue to wage a brutal, unprovoked war across sovereign Ukrainian soil.
STALIN’S SECRET PACT WITH HITLER
What Russia’s May 9 spectacle omits, and what a string of Soviet leaders tried for decades to suppress, was that World War II did not begin with Hitler alone. It began with Hitler and Stalin together.
On August 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a secret agreement to carve up Eastern Europe between them. Just days later, Hitler invaded Poland from the west. Seventeen days after that, Stalin invaded from the east. It was a joint conquest, a coordinated assault that ignited the global war.
From 1939 to 1941, the USSR played the role of supplier and silent enabler. Soviet trains shipped oil, grain, and raw materials to the Third Reich. Stalin’s resources fueled Hitler’s early campaigns across Europe, from the fall of France to the Blitz over Britain.
Only when Hitler turned on Stalin in June 1941 did the Soviet Union join the Allies. And only then did the Kremlin begin to recast itself as a victim.
But the facts remain, without Stalin’s blood pact, without Soviet complicity, Hitler’s war machine may never have been able to spread so far so fast.
UKRAINE’S DEVASTATION ERASED FROM THE SCRIPT
Ukraine was not a spectator to World War II. The country was one of its greatest victims, and later one of its most courageous fighters.
The Eastern Front swept through Ukraine twice. More than 6 million Ukrainians fought in the Red Army, hundreds of thousands more joined partisan and allied forces. Ukraine lost an estimated 8 million people, 5 million civilians and 3 million soldiers.
Entire towns were obliterated. Families vanished. The trauma extened for generations and remains to this day. But in Moscow’s fictional retelling, there is no room for Ukrainian sacrifice. There is only the illusion of Russian heroism.
Today, that selective memory has been weaponized into a toxic ideology. The same army that flattened Mariupol and raped its way through Bucha will march in Moscow’s Red Square, draped in the banners of a war they falsely claim to have won alone. These soldiers and their commanders are not liberators. They are war criminals in ceremonial dress.
THE HORROR OF WAR RETURNS
As Ukraine commemorates May 8, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has framed the current full-scale invasion of his nation as a continuation of the same fight from the Hitler-Stalin era. He has called Ukraine’s struggle “a defense of Europe against tyranny and conquest.” And once again, the aggressor wears the same uniform it claims as sacred.
Russian forces have been accused of committing war crimes on a scale unseen in Europe since World War II. There are documented accounts of summary executions, mass deportations, rape, torture, and the deliberate targeting of civilians.
In three years, at least 620 Ukrainian children have been killed. Nearly 2,000 more have been wounded. Tens of thousands have been abducted and trafficked to Russia.
Entire cities have been shelled into ruin. Civilian infrastructure like hospitals, schools, and energy grids have been systematically destroyed.
Putin’s intent has not been limited to using the military to spread his brutality. By design, the dictator has used psychological tactics to promote terror. He has also attacked Ukraine’s cultural soul. His plans for a complete genocide have attempted to erase Ukraine from maps, Ukrainians from their homes, and delegate its rich heritage to that of a fable.
And yet, on May 9, those same forces will parade through the Russian capital in celebration, their crimes against humanity hidden beneath a myth of Soviet righteousness.
TO MARCH WITH MOSCOW IS TO MARCH OVER THE DEAD
The Kremlin has extended invitations to foreign military personnel to join the parade, a move Ukraine has condemned in the strongest possible terms. Any country that marches alongside the Russian army, Kyiv says, shares in the responsibility for its atrocities.
“To march side by side with them is to share responsibility for the blood of murdered Ukrainian children, civilian and military, not to honor the victory over Nazism.”
A PARADE OF DENIAL
The May 9 parade has never been just about honoring the past. It is a political theater of denial, a ritual in which the Kremlin recasts its wars of aggression as noble campaigns for liberation.
For this year’s dramatic political production, the dissonance is far sharper. Russia is not liberating Ukraine. It is destroying the country, while pretending to relive the glory of defeating fascism.
The irony is unbearable for many. Russia has branded Ukrainians as “Nazis” while deploying the fascist tactics of occupation and ethnic cleansing. Putin invokes the memory of Soviet sacrifice while bombing the grandchildren of those who fought in its ranks. He parades waves of tanks in Moscow while losing them by the hundreds in farm fields across eastern Ukraine.
To equate Russia’s military today with the force that helped push back the Nazis is to insult history. One could claim the title of liberator, which Poland would strongly disagree with. The other is simply a brutal invader.
HISTORY AS SHIELD AND SWORD
The Soviet Union built its postwar identity on the mythology of victory in the “Great Patriotic War.” In modern Russia, that mythology has calcified into dogma. Schoolchildren are taught a version of history in which the USSR stood alone against evil. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is omitted or justified. The Baltic occupation is erased. The mass deportations and purges are downplayed or denied.
This revisionism is not accidental. It is state policy, one that allows the Russian government to cloak its current crimes against humanity in the moral authority of a past it has distorted beyond recognition.
But history is not a weapon. It is a record. And the record is clear. The Soviet Union helped start World War II. Ukraine bore one of the war’s heaviest burdens. And today, Russia uses the memory of that war not to honor its victims, but to justify new ones.
UKRAINIANS REMEMBER WHO THEY ARE
Ukrainians are not confused about who they are or who they are fighting. They are the descendants of soldiers who helped liberate Europe from Nazism. They are the children of survivors who endured genocide, famine, and war. And they are once again resisting a foreign invader determined to break their nation’s will.
The difference now is that the world sees it. The International Court has investigated Russian war crimes and issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest. Human rights organizations are documenting systematic atrocities. And across democratic nations, support for Ukraine remains strong.
Every missile that strikes a Ukrainian hospital, every child who is kidnapped and dragged across the border, every civilian buried in a shallow grave, exposes the moral fraud of the May 9 parade. This is not a remembrance. It is a performance staged by perpetrators.
NO SHARED VICTORY
Russia wants to march under the banner of a shared victory. But there is no shared victory with an aggressor. There is no shared history with a regime that bombs civilian homes.
The memory of World War II does not belong to Russia alone. It belongs to every nation that fought and bled to defeat fascism. Ukraine was one of them. It remains one of them.
What Ukraine needs now is not Russia’s parade. It needs the world to stop pretending Moscow stands on the right side of history.
This May 9, the world must choose. It can remember the truth, or march with the liars.
© Photo
Pavel Bednyakov (AP), Dmitry Serebryakov (AP), Dmitri Lovetsky (AP), and Bissig (via Shutterstock)
