And it was Russian President Putin who once again unleashed the demons of historical revisionism and revanchism, which twice led Europe to war cataclysm. He is the one suffering from the trauma of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The USSR considers the Russian state, the Russian empire, and in the name of remedying this trauma, declared Ukraine an artificial state without the right to sovereign existence.
Every fifth recipient was a Ukrainian
Putin told the Ukrainians that they are not a separate nation, but a part of the Russian one. He carried out the annexation of Crimea and the annexation of the eastern territories of the Ukrainian state in the same way as Hitler and Horthy once did – by supporting separatism in the name of protecting the rights of members of the national minority.
The Russian president makes no secret of the fact that his goal is not the conquest of four Ukrainian regions, which the Russian State Duma illegally declared to be part of the Russian Federation, but the destruction of independent Ukrainian statehood and the deprivation of Ukrainians’ right to freely choose where they want to belong and how their state and society should develop.
That is why his most faithful ally in the European Union was Viktor Orbán, who also suffers from the trauma of the end of the Hungarian empire and is happy that the taboo of changing borders by force has finally fallen in Europe.
And if we talk about what Putin relativized from the legacy of the Red Army, we cannot forget that his war against the descendants of Ukrainian brothers in the fight of Russians and other nations against German Nazism is a huge desecration of the memory of the sacrifices made by the Ukrainian nation eighty-one years ago.
It is also a desecration of the common sacrifices of the Red Army soldiers, their belonging and sacrifice in arms. After all, Ukrainians made up its second largest component. According to research into available archival documents, up to seven million of them wore military uniforms.
Military historians point out that more than half of the fronts had commanders of Ukrainian origin at the end of the Great Patriotic War. Every fifth decorated Hero of the Soviet Union was Ukrainian.
Why does Fico prefer not to go to Kyiv?
It was this federal republic at the time, together with Belarus, that suffered the most casualties in the war, because the front passed through its territory twice. According to some data, Ukrainian citizens made up almost half of the victims of the entire Soviet Union. Therefore, together with Belarus, Ukraine became one of the founding states of the United Nations, along with the USSR.
It is dirty on the part of the current Russian leadership and its propaganda to label the descendants of heroic Ukrainian fighters for the liberation of the USSR and Europe from German Nazism under the Nazis and to wage war against them of a genocidal nature.
And it is dishonest to pass off members of all nations and nationalities of the Soviet Union who fought in the Red Army as Russians and to attribute to them the monopoly credit for liberating Europe from Hitler’s rule. This is also part of the historical memory that we should fight for and should not let it be taken away.
If the Slovak prime minister is so eager to pay his respects to the young men and women who fell during the liberation of Slovakia, not in our cemeteries or, say, in Prague, but directly on the territory of the former Soviet Union, why, after visiting Moscow last year for the 80th anniversary of the end of the war, did he not choose to participate in the Day of Remembrance and Reconciliation in Kyiv on the 81st anniversary?
Why doesn’t he lay a wreath on May 8 at the monument to the Ukrainian victims of the Second World War and the liberators of Europe?
Putin is only feeding himself
Putin did not liberate us 81 years ago. He did not deserve our respect, considering what he did, unlike the fallen Red Army men. He only feeds himself politically on their victims. He builds his imperial mythology with reference to them.
It also includes the false emotional blackmail of the European Union: when you criticize Russia for its imperialist adventures and atrocities in Ukraine, you allegedly disrespect the memory of the sacrifices made by the Russian people for your liberation and stand on the side of fascism. Robert Fico is also trying to play this Russian game in Slovakia.
But Europe and the world cannot function according to Putin’s twisted logic: “We once saved you from the horrors of Nazism, and you are obliged to be grateful to the Russian people, that is, to my regime of personal dictatorship, for that. Therefore, you must not criticize our policy, our repression of the opposition, our wars, the robbery of Ukrainian territory, genocide against the civilian population and other misdeeds that we will do in our surroundings under the slogan ‘Rossiya nado to consider’.’
The liberation of Slovakia and Central and Eastern Europe from the Nazi horrors by the Red Army is not an eternal indulgence for the revisionist and imperialist adventures of the Russian Federation under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin.
