Victory Day Parade in Red Square Moscow ti commemorate the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Nazism.
The Patriotic War claimed 27 million Russian lives and the outcome of World War II would have been vastly different had in not been for the effort of Russia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcFMuLr7TRs
Perhaps a bit of history and perspective are in order
agreed
The pact between Hitler and Stalin that paved the way for World War II was signed 75 years ago
With the stroke of a pen 75 years ago, two men changed the world and sealed the fate of millions.
Those two men were the foreign minister of Nazi Germany, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov. On August 23, 1939, they signed a non-aggression pact, promising not to interfere in case the other went to war.
That public announcement was shocking enough: The two totalitarian states had been at loggerheads for years. But they also signed a second, secret agreement that carved up eastern Europe between them. Those world-changing deals are the subject of "Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact With Stalin, 1939-1941," a book by historian Roger Moorhouse that's due out this fall.
“In fact, the Nazi-Soviet Pact as the kick-off for World War II is probably the most surprising scenario that anyone could have imagined," Moorhouse says. "That’s how you have to view it from the perspective of August 1939. The world was absolutely dumbstruck by this deal.”
Those twin agreements did in fact set the stage for the start of World War II. Within days of signing the pacts, now confident that the Soviets would not oppose him, Hitler invaded Poland. Britain and France declared war on Germany, and the war was underway.
A couple of weeks later, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east to grab its share of the spoils. In 1940 it followed up by occupying Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Romanian province of Bessarabia. Britain and France protested, but with their forces already taking on Germany, they couldn't afford to fight Stalin as well.
