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 Russian President Vladimir Putin and a general salute the crowd.

FOR the Russian people, May 9 is much more than Victory Day in the Great Patriotic War that lasted almost four years and claimed 28 million of Russian men and women.

It has been the country’s true national holiday since Soviet times.

It symbolises the shared gruelling experience, defending the Motherland that shaped and formed Russia’s modern nation and helps to keep it together, even after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Victory Day in Russia commemorates millions of people who lost their lives in the war and honours the bravery of Russian soldiers and Russian people on the whole whose heroism saved the country from Nazi invaders.

Hitler’s Germany launched the war in 1939 with significant victories and conquests, but the entry of the Soviet Union in the conflict was a decisive factor.

Hitler lost two thirds of his military power trying to reach Moscow, that also explains the tremendous loss of civilian and military lives on the Soviet side.

The defence of Moscow and Leningrad, the battle of Stalingrad, the battle of Kursk, the liberation of Soviet republics and European countries — these are not just the stages of that war. These are blood and tears, the anguish of defeat and the triumph of victory, wounds and the death of comrades-in-arms.

There was only one choice — either conquer the enemy or become slaves.

The Soviet Union risked its entire existence as a country in order to destroy fascism.

Today, in most of Europe and the US, celebrations of the end of World War II are a minor thing, but in Russia and other republics of the former Soviet Union, it is a sacred event.

Russians are astonished that the US and much of Europe know so little about the most important holiday in Russia. The USSR made the ultimate sacrifice in the Great Patriotic War, including soldiers and civilians who faced death, starvation and torture by the hands of the fascist enemy.

Members of the security forces go through their drills.

Russia has never forgotten this and that is why defaming Russian political or public figures as “fascist” by Western politicians is the gravest insult imaginable that one could level at any Russian person.

The Soviet Union did far more than the United States and Great Britain combined to destroy Nazi Germany and the Wehrmacht.

The Red Army stood virtually alone in the European fight against the Nazis from 1941 until the Normandy invasion.

The total number of Soviet military and civilian deaths, 28 million, was more than twice the death toll of all Americans, Britons, Commonwealth, French and even Germans killed in the war combined. That is why Victory Day remains the most sacred day of the year in Russia and that is why it is equally revered in many of the former Soviet republics.

Every May 9, a large military parade takes place on Red Square in Moscow, with thousands of soldiers, tanks, missiles and aircrafts involved.

Since 2014, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics have held similar parades honouring both the heroes of the Great Patriotic War as well as those currently fighting the fascist forces of the Kiev-based regime.

The poignancy of fighting the progeny of those who fought beside Hitler in the 1940s, May 9 is all the more meaningful for the people of Donbass.

Any attempts to glorify Nazism and militant nationalism are inadmissible for the Russian people.

Russians believe that attempts to make national heroes out of those who fought against the anti-Hitler coalition during World War II or collaborated with the Nazi are equally inadmissible, sacrilegious, and cynical.

Russia does not and will never accept the well-directed effort meant to rewrite the history, distort and revise results of World War II in the fashion that suits more to the New World Order that West wants to impose.

For example, the liberation of the Nazi extermination camps, including Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, and Sobibor was accomplished by the Red Army.

The Great Patriotic War was, is and always will be a landmark moment in Russia history.

On May 9, Russians and those who value the Russian sacrifice during the war pause, reflect, weep and celebrate the greatest victory in the history of warfare and of mankind.

These days all of Russia pays tribute not just to Soviet soldiers and citizens who sacrificed their lives in the Great Patriotic War, but to the sacrifice of all humanity. — Embassy of Russia.