MAY 9 — Victory Day in Moscow — will be celebrated throughout Russia today, marking the 80th anniversary of Europe’s victory over the Nazis in WWII. It’s May 9 because of the time difference between our countries: when Victory in Europe was signed on May 8 at 23.01 hours Central European time, that was 3 hours later in Moscow, ie on May 9, so this is the day celebrated in Russia and former Soviet republics.

Several world leaders will attend the Red Square celebration, yet Russia’s allies in the war to defeat Nazism — chiefly the US and Great Britain — will not be there. Let’s face it — younger generations of people in the West have grown up not even knowing that the USSR was our ally during those years.

WWII films invariably feature only the Americans and the British fighting the Nazis, with no mention of our then Soviet allies. When the liberation of Auschwitz was commemorated last January, did we hear from our media that it was the Red Army that liberated the starving survivors of that Nazi concentration camp?

Western leaders will not be in Red Square today, but a few of the countries liberated by the Red Army towards the end of the war, such as Slovakia and Serbia (then part of Yugoslavia), have defied the European Union by declaring they will attend Moscow’s Victory Day celebrations.

This despite a thinly disguised threat by the EU’s foreign affairs council high representative, Kaja Kallas, in Luxemburg on April 14: “... any participation in the 9th of May parades — or celebrations — in Moscow will not be taken lightly on the European side, considering that Russia is really waging a full-scale war in Europe.... We made it very clear that we do not want any candidate country to participate in these events on the 9th of May in Moscow.”

Slovakia joined the EU in 2004, so would certainly be defying the EU top diplomats if its Prime Minister, Robert Fico, does attend the Moscow celebrations. Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic said he would attend, sparking a warning by the EU that this “could jeopardise the country’s accession process,” according to Serbian broadcaster N1.

Leaving aside the democratic credentials of the EU Foreign Affairs Council, or lack of them — I mean, who elects these people? — it never fails to astonish me that our greatest ally in the second world war — the USSR — is not even mentioned during our own VE celebrations this week. Instead, a group of Ukraine’s top brass has been invited to our VE celebrations.

Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, now three years old, has cast a long shadow. I’m sure I speak for our readers when I say that none of us likes or wants war; and many felt they could not support Russia’s action. Yet the fact is that Russia had been provoked for years, as Nato, instead of disbanding after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991, has moved steadily eastwards, setting up military bases in eastern Europe near Russia’s borders.

The unpalatable fact is that, ever since 2014, when the elected Yanukovych government was overthrown in a coup, Ukraine — part of the USSR for 70 years — has been taken over by a ruling clique which admires and applauds those Ukrainian nationalists who openly collaborated with the Nazis during their occupation of Ukraine, from 1941 to 1944. While many Ukrainian patriots formed partisan units to fight the Nazi occupiers, others were collaborators.

Since 2014, these Ukrainian ultra-nationalists have waged war against the Russian-speaking part of Ukraine’s population in the east, killing some 15,000 citizens. They have banned left wing political parties, they have imprisoned trades unionists, they have systematically torn down WWII monuments honouring the Red Army’s dead, and have even raised statues of Stepan Bandera, the leading wartime Ukrainian Nazi collaborator. They have restricted the use of the Russian language in schools, under the 2017 Law on Education, and introduced new textbooks with a nationalistic, anti-Russian version of history.

“Denazification” was stated as one of the goals of Russia’s 2022 invasion of eastern Ukraine. Russia’s security was another, given Nato’s steady advance right up to Russia’s borders, despite assurances to the contrary given to former president Gorbachev in 1990.

The truth is that we in Britain are only getting one side of the story. TV channel Russia Today is banned here and throughout the EU, so we never hear Russia’s point of view.

Would the second world war have been won without the USSR? Most historians concur that its role was fundamental in the 1945 victory over the German Nazis, whose horrific death camps had led to the extermination of 6 million Jews, communists, Roma and trades unionists.

The Nazi Aryan supremacist, racist ideology regarded not only Jews as untermenschen to be exterminated, but Slavs too. And when the Nazis invaded the USSR, occupying Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia, they showed no mercy.

The USSR lost 27 million people in that war, when we were allies. Leningrad was besieged by the Nazis for two years and four months, losing 1.5 million of its citizens. Leningraders were gradually starving to death, at least before the Red Army managed to create an ice road across Lake Ladoga — the Road of Life — during the two winters of the siege, in order to get food to the besieged city. Over 1.3 million people, mainly women and children, were evacuated this way over the ice.

No wonder President Putin feels strongly about his country’s security. He is the descendant of Leningrad blokadniki (siege victims) on both maternal and paternal sides of his family.

I remember about 20 years ago going to an exhibition at Nottingham University’s Lakeside arts centre of wartime posters and leaflets. Some were Soviet TASS posters, others had been produced by our wartime British government and were full of praise for our great Soviet ally.

This week — whether we call it VE Day or Victory Day — I shall be thinking of all the young men and women of both Britain and the former USSR who died in WWII defending their countries. I shall be thinking of the brave partisans of occupied France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and of Ukraine, Belarus and Western Russia, whose heroism contributed so much to our joint allied victory over fascism and Nazism.