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Putin pays tribute to the Red Army's defeat of Nazi Germany at delayed victory parade

RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin paid tribute to the Red Army’s defeat of Nazi Germany yesterday at a delayed Victory Day parade.

Each year Russia holds a parade in Moscow’s Red Square on May 9, the date in 1945 on which Germany surrendered to the Soviet Union, but this year the event was postponed because of the coronavirus lockdown.

It was held instead on the 75th anniversary of 1945’s original victory parade of Red Army units returning from the liberation of Europe from fascism.

Soldiers from a number of former Soviet republics and allied countries including Mongolia and Serbia were among the 14,000 troops taking part.

But the usual march by civilians carrying portraits of relatives who served in the war, known as the “immortal regiment,” could not be held due to fears about the virus, with Russia reporting more than 7,000 new cases a day this week.

Mr Putin said it was “impossible to imagine what would have happened to the world if the Red Army did not stand up in its defence.

“It was our people who were able to overcome a terrible, total evil,” he declared.

“This is the main, honest, and in no way unclear, truth about the war. We must protect and defend it, pass it on to our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren,” he said, a reference to attempts to rewrite the history of the war to portray the Soviet Union as an aggressor in documents like the European Parliament’s “On the Importance of European Remembrance for the Future of Europe.”

The Soviet Union made the biggest contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany in the second world war, responsible for approximately 80 per cent of German military casualties overall and suffering 27 million deaths.

British wartime leader Winston Churchill acknowledged that “the Red Army tore the guts out of the Nazi war machine.”

The parade in 1945 was the largest in Russian history, with over 40,000 soldiers taking part, and was led by Soviet military commander Marshal Georgi Zhukov.

Troops threw the banners of defeated Nazi units, including that of Hitler’s personal bodyguard, at the feet of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who presided from atop the Lenin Mausoleum.

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