Sky News reports:
Russia holds scaled-down military parade
Russia's annual parade celebrating victory in World War II was scaled down this year, following an increase in Ukrainian drone attacks on Moscow.
According to Sky, this was a 'display of weakness for Vladimir Putin'.
The Critic newsletter mocked:
Victory Day in Moscow was a bleak affair. The Kremlin must have rejected the more contemporary name Still No Victory Day.
It left off the he-he.
Hello.
Russia is currently fighting a real war with its own weapons and soldiers unlike the UK that is providing the weapons for someone else to fight their proxy war and die for them.
Russia celebrating it's Victory Day sticks in the craw of Western Europe who think they won the war when it was the Soviet Union (including today's Belorussia, Russia and Ukraine) that suffered the lion's share of overall casualties and relentless German atrocities.
Historians know this and that it was the Soviet Union that broke the back of the Wehrmacht in ruthless fighting, clearing the way for D-Day, and who occupied Berlin first.
Most of the Nazis who ended up in Soviet gulags did not survive - unlike those who were given plum post-war jobs by the western allies or exported to the USA or UK for their 'expertise' - much of it built on slave-labour provided by the Soviet Union and other German-occupied territories.
No-one in western Europe - whether they were Nazi-occupied or not - has any idea of the scale of losses and atrocities that the Soviet Union suffered in WW2 so how can they even relate?
It's embarrassing for Western Europe to admit this in these Russo-phobic times, so it would rather dismiss the Russian experience of WW2 in favour of their own cosy myths of plucky dambusters who ended up killing lots of civilians and great escapes from the Stalag Luft camps that were like 5-star hotels by comparison with the slave-labour camps the slavic prisoners endured (and those sent to the Japanese POW death-camps).