On the eve of the celebration of the date when the Allies defeated Adolf Hitler’s Germany in World War II, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky used historical memory this Sunday (8) in public speeches to mobilize support.
Russia’s president said that his soldiers, like the ancestors of the Soviet Union, are fighting to “clear the motherland of Nazi filth”, a clear allusion to the allegations that Ukraine must be “denazified”, presented by him from the beginning as a of the justifications for invading the neighbor and contested by experts.
His Ukrainian counterpart compared Russian actions to those of the Nazis. In a video filled with historical references, he said that Moscow is putting on a “bloody staging, a fanatical repetition of Nazism”, and added that Russia seems to want to take the Nazi protagonism of history as one of the greatest evils in human history.
Putin was speaking to territories allied with Moscow — such as the Belarusian dictatorship, the separatists of Trandnistria, in Moldova, the government of Kazakhstan and the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, in Donbass, eastern Ukraine — in a speech related to Victory Day, which will be celebrated this Monday (9).
Zelensky, in turn, wearing a shirt with the phrase “I am Ukrainian” in English and standing in front of bombed buildings, used the date of Remembrance and Reconciliation Day to mobilize not only the people of his country, but also of other nations. He made references, among others, to the United Kingdom, Poland and France.
The Kremlin leader said that as in 1945, the Russians will again win. And he continued: “Today Nazism raises its head again; our duty is to stop the ideological successors of those who have already been defeated.”
The Ukrainian president, speaking for more than 10 minutes, said that “evil has returned to Ukraine”. “Decades after World War II, darkness has returned. With different uniforms and slogans, but with the same purpose: a bloody reconstruction of Nazism in Ukraine.”
The country was occupied by the Nazis from 1941 to 1944, at which time it was still part of the Soviet Union. Before the invasion, the capital, Kiev, was home to about 160,000 Jews — 20% of the local population — and more than 100,000 of them fled fearing violence. Numerous episodes of violence were recorded, one of the main ones being the Babi Yar, when more than 33,000 Jews were murdered.
The 74th day of the conflict was also marked by claims by authorities in Lugansk that a school that served as a shelter for about 90 people was destroyed after a bombing. At least 60 are still missing in the rubble, and the regional governor, Serguei Gaidai, said they are probably all dead.
He said that rescuers from the village of Bilogorivka had difficulty working through the night because the attacks did not stop — on the contrary, they increased when lights in the surroundings were turned on to facilitate the search for possible survivors.
Gaidai also said that Ukrainian troops had left Popasna, the scene of intense bombing over the past few weeks. The site would be “completely destroyed”. Earlier, Chechnya dictator Ramzan Kadyrov, an ally of Moscow, said his troops had taken control of most of the city.
On the Russian side, the Defense Ministry claimed to have destroyed a Ukrainian navy warship near Odessa with missiles. The folder also claims to have shot down two Ukrainian SU-24 fighter-bombers and a Mi-24 attack helicopter on the island of Cobra in the Black Sea, information that could not be independently confirmed.
