AS GUNS fell silent and peace dawned across Europe in May 1945 with the final defeat of Hitler, a top secret document laid on Churchill’s desk — a plan for British and US forces in Germany to re-arm their former enemy, and jointly attack the front line held by their former Soviet allies. “The date for the opening of hostilities is July 1 1945” — four days before a general election.

The aptly named Operation Unthinkable concluded the Red Army could not be routed, and was shelved by Attlee’s Labour after a landslide win as the nation entered five decades of cold war. Declassified in 1998, the document echoes a common lament of German officers in British captivity: their two nations should not be in conflict, but together fighting the real enemy — the USSR.

Now, as Britain commemorates VE Day, the unthinkable has come to pass: the nation is in a de facto state of war with Russia, over the fate of its neighbour Ukraine — a catastrophic conflict causing millions displaced, hundreds of thousands killed, and the world closer than ever to nuclear war. With some British public services now bracing for cuts of up to 11 per cent to continue funding militarism in Ukraine, remembrance of the sacrifices made for VE Day are worthy of reflection, and asking a simple question — how did it come to this?

There are many pieces to the puzzle of causation for the war — this article cannot give them all — culpability of the Russian state is easily found by reading British mainstream media sources, so it does not need to be reiterated here; but readers may find some insight into some causes lost in the overall narrative presented by media that the late war correspondent John Pilger described as the most propagandised war of his lifetime.

At the dawn of the cold war in 1954, Soviet foreign minister Molotov requested to join Nato but was rejected.

With the fall of the USSR and Warsaw Pact in 1991, US delegates assured president Gorbachev that Nato would not expand to threaten security of Russia’s Western border.

Two decades subsequent, that verbal pledge proved false; ex-Soviet satellite states aligned with a US-led military alliance now looking to leave them rudderless under Trump’s America First policy. Putin suggested Russia join Nato in 2001 — calling on a common cause to fight Islamist terrorism. Yet expansion continued, and in 2008 Nato announced that Ukraine would eventually become a member. For Russia, the possibility of this encroachment was the last straw, aware of the US investing $5 billion in Ukraine’s politics via NGOs up to 2014.

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This was the year Ukraine’s president Yanukovych, mired by corruption, hesitated between signing a trade deal with the EU, demanding austerity as it did with Greece prior, and an alternative offer from Russia securing low-cost gas, albeit with restrictions on EU trade and ties. Mass protests erupted at Maidan Square in Kiev, from those frustrated at the prospect of no integration with the West.

Yanukovych was ousted by ultra-nationalist militias such as Pravy Sektor (Right Sector) — far-right, Eurosceptic, for an ethnically pure Ukraine, seeing Russia as a malignant colonial force. This nationalism was also fostered by Western influence — the CIA-fronted US National Endowment for Democracy provided aid; senator John McCain addressed protesters, and a leaked phone call from secretary of state Victoria Nuland exposed the US shaping the post-Maidan government for Ukraine in Kiev, including a clique of neonazi politicians in prominent positions.

Now, Maidan is either viewed as a revolution for Ukrainian identity or just another US coup. In retaliation, Russia swiftly annexed the strategically vital Crimean peninsula with no bloodshed — aided by defectors including high-ranking naval officers from the port of Sevastopol, a crucial warm-water base that provides access to the Black Sea and a route through Istanbul to the Mediterranean Sea and beyond, vital for maritime trade.

Yet, in the south and east of Ukraine, another protest movement emerged: anti-Maidan. Ukrainians with Soviet nostalgia and bonded to Russia by a language the government in Kiev sought to now restrict attempted to seize power in cities, aided by paramilitaries from Russia itself, clashing with armed forces from Kiev’s Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO).

Civilians aggrieved by this hostility stood in the way of tanks, protesting at fascism, with thousands of soldiers refusing to attack their own people and defecting to the pro-Russian side: in Kharkiv, Odessa, and other cities the ATO prevailed, whereas in the Donbass region’s fluid border with Russia, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics were created, and militias formed from Donbass natives — coalminers, women, thousands of former police and special services, who sought to resist what was perceived as an oppressive neofascist Kiev junta.

Units such as the Vostok Brigade attract leftist volunteers from abroad, planting their unit’s red hammer and sickle flag above captured territories. French volunteers form a drone unit named Normandie-Niemen, after the Franco-Soviet air squadron of 1942.

Small far-right aligned units are rarer on the pro-Russian side, ideologies being a mixture of Soviet, imperial tsarist and Orthodox Church, a concept of honouring the sacrifices of ancestors who fought the Great Patriotic War against Nazism being the idea overall, with the orange and black St George’s ribbon being a symbol partially equivalent to Britain’s red poppy.

The legacy of this 1941-1945 war cannot be underestimated in Russia and Ukraine: up to 80 per cent of German casualties fell fighting the USSR, compared to approximately 5 to 7 per cent taken by armed forces of Britain, which did not see its soil undergo occupation and genocide on an enormous scale; up to 27 million casualties were taken by the USSR.

In the wake of 2014 Ukraine’s Maidan revolution, an eight-year civil war ensued in Donbass — a duel fuelled by Russian and US-Western support, causing thousands of civilian casualties, hardening the population against rule by Kiev that cut off welfare and pensions, branding them as separatists and traitors.

Their sufferings were, and are, rarely seen in British mainstream media — unworthy victims of geopolitical superpower machinations in another case of what John Pilger termed “the war you don’t see.”

Rare independent journalists from around the globe showing this side of the conflict are targeted by Kiev-based website Myrotvorets (“peace maker”), publishing personal details of any dissenters, then stamping them as “eliminated” when killed.

The site contains dossiers on thousands, from Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters to natives of Crimea and Donbass, including 15-year-old Fania Savenkova who wrote to the United Nations and sent a message to Palestine: “I have hope that Donbass, Syria and Palestine will be free and children will stop dying from shells.”

None of this background was provided in the British media coverage of Russia’s euphemistically titled Special Military Operation in February 2022, an escalation that shocked and harrowed the world, with stated aims of demilitarising and denazification of Ukraine. Denazification has been dismissed by Western media and politicians, fearing admittance of a problem could be seen as justifying the Russian intervention.

After Maidan, decommunisation laws in Ukraine prohibited a range of specific Soviet-era symbols resulting in absurdities such as computer game Mortal Kombat II banned due to the character Kold War Skarlet, and tragedies as a 47-year-old man from Lviv imprisoned for posting hammer and sickle images commemorating May 9 Victory Day on social media.

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This day — equivalent to our VE Day — had been a flashpoint for Ukraine in recent years, with civil unrest between nationalists and pro-Soviet era parties clashing.

The swastika is supposedly outlawed in Ukraine, but its display by units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) go unpunished — laws have not prevented flagrant use of Nazi-style eagles, SS lightning bolts in the insignia of Vedmedi Assault Group, nor one named Nachtigall, a nod to the battalion formed of Ukrainians by Germans in 1941 for Operation Barbarossa.

Veterans of the 14th Waffen-SS Galician division created by Heinrich Himmler from Ukrainian volunteers have been openly venerated in public ceremonies. In 2023 a bizarre scandal saw elderly veteran Yaroslav Hunka invited by speaker Anthony Rota to the Canadian parliament as a hero who fought against Russia in the second world war — applauded in the chamber and by visiting President Volodymyr Zelensky.

When Hunka’s previous SS membership was soon revealed by press, Rota was forced to resign, a PR disaster for Kiev. The most infamous manifestation of neonazism, Azov — once a mere battalion, now expanded to a corps — was proscribed by Facebook alongside the Ku Klux Klan, until the Russian invasion of February 2022. British media subsequently whitewashed Azov as heroic defenders of Mariupol.

Lesser-known ultra-nationalist and neonazi brigades bear names such as Carpathian Sich, or Kraken Regiment, responsible for demolishing a monument to Marshal Georgy Zhukov, a Soviet-era hero who planned the capture of Berlin in 1945.

In western Ukraine, statues commemorating Red Army veterans are toppled, whereas those glorifying the notorious Stepan Bandera whose OUN-B that collaborated with Germans, committing Holocaust atrocities and fighting Soviet partisans, remain standing — streets in Lviv and Kiev being named in his honour and torchlit parades held.

A common Russian war narrative is that they are fighting an army of Banderites and Nazis, though after three years of war many AFU soldiers are conscripts caught by roving “territorial centre of recruitment” (TCR) teams.

Evading the so-called “people-hunters lurking in gyms and bars is a hazard for Ukrainian men barred from leaving the country, evidenced by viral videos of TCR thugs grappling and pushing draft evaders into vans as brave relatives and passers-by intervene in the struggle.

Bribery for escaping the TCR is rife — the poorer working class are most vulnerable. Russia has also seen a mass diaspora after mobilising reservists, as many soldiers’ contracts ended soon after the launch of the invasion in February 2022.

The initial shock of the 2022 Russian invasion and its tragic consequences induced a surge of empathy and support for its victims. Refugees fled to neighbouring European nations as support for resistance solidified.

In Britain, this was paired with a propaganda effort to support the Nato war effort, including mainline railway stations bearing billboards urging travellers to “Be Brave like Ukraine.” According to UN statistics, the foremost recipient of refugees from Ukraine was Russia — receiving 1,227,555 persons.

Russia has been accused of kidnapping unaccompanied and orphaned children from the warzone, though in cases where parents are located, they have been returned to their families in Ukraine.  

After initial fast advances in early 2022, Russian military failed in its objective of capturing Kiev for a swift victory, and saw their gains made in areas of Kharkiv in the north, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in the south negated by AFU pushbacks in the south, causing a retreat to the south bank of the Dnieper river, a natural water barrier more easily defended. Referendums held in these two partially held Oblasts plus Donetsk and Lugansk saw their accession to the Russian Federation, unrecognised by other nations following US policy.

Tactically, the style of fast armoured advances seen in European battlefields of the 1939-45 war have been shown to be a thing of the past, drone warfare enabling both sides to spot any large gathering of force. This has resulted in a slow grinding war of attrition, the Russian military now making gains of around 10 square kilometres daily across a contact line extending across more than 1,000km.

The AFU’s 2023 summer offensive was a disaster, needlessly sacrificing thousands of lives, led in part by British military under Project Alchemy that continued to send soldiers across the Dnieper river only to die on a tiny beachhead in the village of Krynky, needlesly held for the sake of PR, as described by discontented Ukrainian soldiers. A last gamble by the AFU saw them invading Russia’s Kursk region, resulting in encirclement.

US General Mark Milley stated in late 2022 that chances of Ukraine recapturing the Donbass and Crimea were “highly unlikely,” as Nato continued to drip-feed weapons in a proxy war that US Senator Lindsay Graham called “a great investment.”

“We haven’t lost one soldier — we’ve reduced the combat power of the Russian army by 50 per cent, not one of us has died in that endeavour, this is a great deal for America.” It has also captured a large part of the European gas market from Russia — Britain’s “cost of living crisis” being a result.  

An early peace deal proposed at Istanbul between Russia and Ukraine fell through in 2022 — allegedly scuppered by then embattled PM Boris Johnson, encouraging Ukraine to “keep fighting.”

Absurdly, a potential hope for peace is in the hands of Trump — who is finding negotiations difficult as Russia has the upper hand on the battlefield, and Zelensky is wary of ceding any territory lest he face a coup or worse at the hands of the far-right Pravy Sektor group that led the charge at Maidan in 2014. He has already been threatened not to  “capitulate,” by Azov in 2019.

The far right is not a majority position in Ukraine, but it wields significant power.

Ukrainian people deserve an end to war, wherever their allegiances lie — to Kiev, Russia, or more likely, simply to a glimpse of hope for peace. That should be the lesson as we remember the sacrifices that gave us Victory in Europe 80 years ago.