Each 5 December, Russians observe the anniversary of Marshal Zhukov’s 1941 victory over the Nazi invasion of their Motherland. At the very gates of Moscow, he achieved the Red Army’s first success in what is called the Great Patriotic War. It was the Wehrmacht’s first defeat, and shattered notions of their invincibility and the supremacy of blitzkrieg tactics. Always an important anniversary for Muscovites, who nearly lost their city to the fascist hordes, it was a date widely commemorated in the former USSR. 

We in the West blink and miss the entirety of the 1941-45 Eastern Front war, concerned only with our Home Front, Battle of Britain, North Africa, D-Day and beyond. Yet it rightly remains core business in today’s Russian Federation and for its leaders. President Putin is haunted by it, for the conflict shaped his life and thinking, and gave us the autocratic proto-Stalin we have today. His heritage from the war is not untypical of many Russians: Vladimir’s elder brother, Vitya, died of diphtheria and starvation during Leningrad’s siege, whilst his maternal grandmother was killed in 1941 and uncles disappeared elsewhere on the Eastern Front. He grew up closer to power than many realise, for his grandfather, Spiridon, was a cook to Lenin and Stalin. One can imagine the alternating stories of recipes and terror the young Vlad absorbed, perched on his grandpa’s knee.

Every May in Moscow, Putin clutches a photograph of his father in uniform

Putin’s father, Vladimir Senior, was severely wounded in the Nevsky Pyatachok bridgehead. A few miles southeast of today’s St Petersburg, the marshy, wooded terrain by the Neva River was the scene of endless fighting to break the 1941-44 German siege. After the war, the region became a national monument, and when last I visited, official guides were busy pointing out weapons and helmets embedded in growing trees, preserved tanks and trenches, rows of unexploded wartime munitions, and St Petersburg schoolchildren hunted for the skeletal remains of the fallen and buried them in official ceremonies. 

Much visited by the Russian leader, it amounts to Putin’s own personal version of Gettysburg, the Somme or Stalingrad. Every May in Moscow, he clutches a photograph of his father in uniform and joins families who glide past the Kremlin bearing portraits of their Red Army forebears from the war, in the so-called March of the Immortal Regiment. It is the Russian state’s equivalent of the British and Commonwealth’s Remembrance Sunday, but with heavy political overtones. For William Faulkner’s famous dictum, that “the past is never dead. It’s not even passed,” is alive and well in Putintown, where the president has weaponised his country’s history.

Like the Roman Emperors of old erasing the activities of their predecessors, Russia’s new Tsar has unleashed his nation’s academic horsepower to rewrite the national story. For World War Two, this includes overlooking the Arctic convoys and Lend-Lease tanks, trucks and aircraft gifted to Stalin during the war, minimising the contributions of the Western allies to victory in 1945 and presenting the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, when Stalin partnered Hitler, as “a necessary defensive measure,” due to France and Britain ceding Czechoslovakia to Germany earlier at Munich. Poland’s right to self-determination doesn’t get a look in, and Churchill’s wartime leadership is demoted to the ravings of an alcoholic aristocrat. Now the Russian leader has grown bolder and stretched his twisted narrative into the present day, telling his people via newspapers, television and the internet, all of which he controls, that Russia’s incursions into Ukraine amount to a new fascism-cleansing crusade above censure, and that in helping Kyiv, the West remains obsessed in vilifying Russia, as they have always done. 

Since taking power (as long ago as 31 December 1999, when he succeeded the vodka-sodden Boris Yeltsin), Putin’s core historical narrative has been one of suspicion of the West. Since the days of Gustavus Adophus and Napoleon, the Kaiser and Austro-Hungarian Emperors, never mind Hitler then NATO, he and his pocket presenters claim, western nations have sought to belittle Mother Russia, insult its culture and snatch its land. They argue that alleged anti-Russian militancy in Ukraine was the reason why the Kyiv regime needed to be toppled in 2022 and reabsorbed into the Motherland.

In July 2020, the president published his own essay expressing anger that the conflict which cost the Soviet Union more than 25 million dead is overlooked by Westerners. Putin probably has a point about our collective ignorance of the Soviet Union’s losses, but we must also bear in mind Georgy Zhukov’s methodology of victory regardless of sacrifice. His defence of his capital in December 1941 came at the expense of more casualties than the combined losses of Britain and America in the entire Second World War, and cost the Germans in excess of half a million soldiers. In 2000, historian Rüdiger Overmans published German Military Losses in World War II (English edition 2004), the result of Bundeswehr official statistical analysis of 1939-45. It concluded there had been 5,318,531 deaths in the forces fighting for the Third Reich, of which 78.9 per cent, or four out of five of all Axis personnel serving under the Nazi banner, occurred on the Eastern Front. It puts a different perspective on our place in the Second World War, but should not belittle it.

The effect on the former USSR was even more profound. A figure of 20 million military and civilian dead used to be the official total during the Soviet era and was cited in the 1973-4 Thames television documentary World at War. However, official post-Soviet historical studies in 1993 by the Russian Academy of Sciences put their war deaths far higher, at 26.6 million, including the 8,668,400 military losses calculated by the Russian Ministry of Defence. This equated to one in seven of the entire 1940 Soviet population. Since then, officials at the Russian Central Defence Ministry Archive have asserted an uncorroborated fourteen million dead and missing service personnel. 

Putin was reacting to Kyiv’s Orange Revolution of November 2004 exactly twenty years ago

We are unlikely to ever know the true total, but for every German warrior killed in the East during 1941-45, at least two and maybe three uniformed Soviets perished. In addition, through studies conducted since 1995, Russian academics estimated civilian fatalities of up to 13.7 million, from premeditated extermination, murders of forced labourers and prisoners, plus famine deaths from confiscation of food. Around 1,710 Soviet towns and 70,000 villages were razed to the ground. With a Russo-German butcher’s bill possibly surpassing 30 million, a figure beyond comprehension, the Nazi campaign initiated on 22 June 1941 and begun to be checked on 5 December the same year, was catastrophic in every way for Hitler’s Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union, and redrew the map of central and Eastern Europe, a process still undergoing revision today.

From this, Putin has developed the idea that the Great Patriotic War was a no less than crusade to rescue the entire world, for which the darker chapters of the Red Army’s wartime behaviour are somehow above criticism. By extension, he implies that Russian behaviour in Ukraine today is also beyond censure. Today, questioning any aspect of the Red Army’s WWII achievements would be the equivalent in the West of denigrating or denying the heroism displayed in the blitz, Battle of Britain or at Pearl Harbor. However, under King Vladimir, Russian lessons from 1941-45, traditionally summarised as “Never again,” seem to have morphed into “We can do it again!” New military history books are being published in their millions, spelling out the past as “a road from one victory to the next, where more beautiful victories lie ahead.” Past triumphs are depicted as the result of patriotism, brought about by strong and decisive leadership, be it of a Tsar or Soviet leader, and in the future, the serving President. 

It was in 2005 that the Kremlin first backed a campaign encouraging ordinary Russians to display the orange-and-black ribbons of the Order of St. George, the state’s highest military award, first established in 1769, dissolved in 1917, and reestablished in 1992, in observance of the 60th anniversary of their victory over the Third Reich. This began a fanatical victory cult of ever more extravagant forms of Patriotic War reverence, where statues of Stalin and his henchmen have been re-erected, re-enactors don the uniforms of World War Two personnel, including the dreaded NKVD, restore and ride the era’s vehicles, whilst sports teams wear the old USSR insignia. Business in Soviet headgear and flags is brisk. Deep down, Putin taps into Stalin’s belief that the affairs of the state are always more important than individual lives. He praises and encourages the cult of self-sacrifice and readiness to shed one’s life for a greater cause, and with the help of Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus since 2009, has readopted war as a state religion.

The year 2005 was also when Putin first began to indicate his antipathy to the drift of Eastern Europe to the West, branding the fall of the USSR “the greatest political catastrophe of the twentieth century,” and bemoaning the “epidemic of disintegration” which put “tens of millions of countrymen” beyond the borders of Russia in 1991. This was a stab aimed at Ukraine, home to the largest cohort of ethnic Russians from the former Soviet Union. Putin was also reacting to Kyiv’s Orange Revolution of November 2004, exactly twenty years ago, when his preferred presidential candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, failed to be elected. 

As Peter Dickinson of the Atlantic Council reminds us, when Putin’s nefarious subordinate, Yanukovych, subsequently gained power in 2010, he was immediately arm-twisted to abandon European integration and return Kyiv to Moscow’s orbit. This was against the wishes of most Ukrainians, and provoked a second revolution, the Euromaidan, which began in November 2013 and culminated in the fall of the pro-Moscow regime in February 2014. Faced with the failure of his political gerrymandering, Putin then opted for a military solution, seizing the Crimea, and sent forces into eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region days later. When it became obvious this limited military intervention had merely pushed Ukraine’s resolve into leaving his sphere of influence altogether, Putin began plotting what became the full-scale invasion of February 2022.

He believed that victory in 1945 was achieved through an iron will, control of the populace, notion of country and strong leadership, concepts he considered diminished with the death of Stalin on 5 March 1953 and vanished on 26 December 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Ironically when Russia invaded in 2022, it was Zelensky and Ukraine, not Putin and Russia, which adopted this quartet of nation-building characteristics, crafting from them a hardy resilient people who believed in themselves as never before. 

This is despite Russia’s tales of the past being dragged centre stage over the last twenty years and used to legitimise every aspect of Putin’s rule. Replacing the state adhesive of Communism, it is faux history that now anchors Russian Federation orthodoxy, which also includes geopolitical mutterings of traditional sovereignty, spheres of influence, accusations of “the decline of the West” and to the delight of the Orthodox Church, embraces vague notions of “the protection of traditional values.” By contrast in the West, history is barely on school curricula, state directed or not.

Coinciding with its occupation of the Donbas and Crimea, in 2014 Putin’s government adopted a law which equates “spreading false information about the actions of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War” to “rehabilitating Nazism.” Committing an offence amounts to “voicing or publishing an incorrect understanding of the war,” the correct interpretation of which lies with Putin and his pocket academics. Contravention is punishable by jail terms, fines, or both. British historian Antony Beevor, author of the widely-acclaimed Stalingrad and Berlin, which have fundamentally reassessed both campaigns, observes that had he been researching these books in Russia today, Putin would have jailed him. He also asserts “more Red Army personnel were arrested by the NKVD in the first five months of 1945 than in the whole of the rest of the war, because of the fear that troops who had witnessed better living conditions in western Europe were likely to bring back dissatisfaction with Stalin’s USSR. Putin knows only too well that a successful and free neighbouring Ukraine is a similar threat to his antediluvian Russia.

New laws have extended the “correct understanding” clause to anyone questioning Russia’s purpose and behaviour in Ukraine. Ordinary folk who protest, such as teachers, librarians and those arrested at street rallies, end up in a ghastly prison. For the persistent, high-profile thorns of Putin, a different fate is organised, which my friends at The Atlantic magazine label Sudden Russian Death Syndrome. Here, methodology is important, where the innovative manner of demise is like a fingerprint, designed to emphasise power and global reach, as with the godfathers of mafia families or bosses of drug cartels, and deliberately designed to serve as a warning to others. November 2024 alone has seen TV chef, restauranteur and war critic Alexei Zemin expire unexpectedly in his Belgrade hotel, whilst world-renowned ballet star and peace activist Vladimir Shklyarov presumably took one leap too many and found himself tumbling out of a fifth-floor St Petersburg window. 

Newsweek, Radio Free Europe and my good chum Professor Google maintain lists containing the names of prominent Russians who all happen, at various times, to have rubbed shoulders with the Kremlin leader but subsequently became fully paid-up members of the Vladimir Putin Disappreciation Society. Absent-mindedly, they forgot to stick to yogurt and fruit, wear bullet-proof vests, live on the ground floor, eschew water polo, or avoid chopping wood. With distressing frequently, the media remind us how each has accidentally ingested a little-known Asiatic toad venom, overstepped whilst admiring the view from a high window, sometimes suffered a tragic mishap handling a firearm, suddenly forgotten how to swim, or occasionally tripped over a blunt axe.

Defenestration is the term for the main cause of departure, originating in Prague in 1419, when a judge, the burgomaster, and thirteen members of the town council exited the city castle by this unusual method, repeated in 1483 and again in 1618, when rebel Protestant leaders removed two Catholic royal regents and their secretary from the same locus by similar means, which triggered the Thirty Years’ War. Indeed, Daniel Jütte’s 2017 paper on its origins, Windows, Power and Political Culture in Early Modern Europe, might well serve as a narrative title of our own times. Becoming a form of extermination known as the “Bohemian Method”, it was more recently brought to our attention in September 2022, when Ukraine invasion-critic Ravil Maganov, forgot his panoramic hospital window had been removed for repair, and in October 2024, when former oil executive Mikhail Rogachev slipped and fell whilst window cleaning in his eleventh floor Moscow apartment.

Putin rattles his sabres because he finds that such intimidation tactics work

Politicians from Berlin to Beijing are wondering what a new US foreign policy will bring after Trump’s inauguration on 20 January 2025. One thing is certain: the outcome of the current Russo-Ukraine war will not be decided “in a day” as the forthcoming 47th President claimed on his campaign trail. The best we might hope for would be an armistice, a temporary cessation of fighting, whilst terms are agreed. With a war of this scale and borders possibly to be redrawn, several interested parties including NATO near-neighbours, plus Britain, France, and Germany, would be looking on. There would be obvious disquiet at the fate of Ukraine effectively being decided by a third party, America, whilst we might be looking at protracted negotiations of the length seen at Versailles, signed in June 1919 seven months after the last shots of the Great War were exchanged, and coming into effect fourteen months later, in January 1920. The Congress of Vienna, which managed the end of the Napoleonic era was equally tortuous, taking from September 1814 to June 1815.

I was dining with three Ukrainian friends recently, who were adamant they would never accept the loss of the Donbas region or Crimea. They worried that the contested provinces of Lugansk, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk and possibly Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia would be ceded to the invader or be put into some kind of neutral buffer zone, though these amounted to Kyiv’s five main centres of manufacturing industry. In robbing the Ukrainian state of its wealth production, they argued convincingly, any such deal would be like gifting Wales or California against their will to a neighbouring aggressor state. Quite apart from the moral aspects of rewarding a belligerent neighbour, international diplomacy and justice would be discredited for a generation. Additionally, abandoning the Crimea would also give Russia de facto geopolitical control of the Black Sea, enabling it to regulate Ukrainian exports of grain, and threaten its other users — Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Georgia. International will to continue economic sanctions against Russian banks, institutions and individuals would wither, plus, they observed, you could kiss goodbye to any notion of International Criminal Court trials in the Hague, bringing justice to the massacred and tortured.

For my own part, I wonder how any kind of a buffer zone might work. For a start it would be illogical, bringing Western peacekeepers right to the borders of Russia. From my days as the NATO Historian in Bosnia, I know that peace can only be implemented and enforced and a war-torn region stabilised, with the buy-in of all sides, which looks unlikely at present. No-fly-zones require third party air forces to operate within the contested air space, policing all air traffic and in extremis shooting down any offenders. Over a million mines and unexploded munitions need to be removed from the battlefields. Refugees who have fled abroad and internally displaced children and orphans want encouragement to return. Thousands of settlements and their power stations, schools, hospitals, churches and houses have to be rebuilt, all far beyond the financial means of Ukraine, whether hobbled by future peace conditions or not. Civic infrastructure, from fire and rescue vehicles to dustcarts and buses are in dire need of replacement. Airports must reopen.

Yet, times have changed since those giddy days of 1990s “liberal interventionism”. Then, the NATO-led peace keeping coalition of 39 pro-interventionist nations in Bosnia, nowadays EU-led, spent billions of dollars and sent tens of thousands of troops to oversee the transition to normality, a process still not quite yet finished. In today’s war-weary era, there is certainly no political will to deploy personnel or spend trillions on a potentially endless mercy mission in far larger eastern Ukraine. And would the Kremlin’s espionage, media provocations, border incursions, and cyber-attacks, and those of her allies, suddenly cease? Ukraine, and Eastern Europe would continue to worry that Russia had been given enough breathing space to reorganise, re-equip and try again. Rumours swirl of some kind of deal for Ukraine to join the EU in the future, but until we have more clarity, the Trump-Musk doctrine seems to be for a reduced-size Ukraine to fend for itself outside NATO: music to Putin’s ears.

In the meantime, the Russian leader continues to rattle his extensive collection of sabres. He does so because he finds that such intimidation tactics work particularly in Germany and America, which explains the past reluctance of both governments to escalate supply to Ukraine of the next level of weapons and platforms until the very last minute, be they tanks, jets, missiles, other armoured vehicles, or land mines. When a new system does arrive from the West, such as ground-based ATACMS or air-launched Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles, Putin immediately retaliates. The recent arrival of Iranian drones, North Korean mercenaries, the first of whom have reportedly been killed and injured, alleged Chinese sabotage of subsea internet cables or the 21 November landing of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on Dnipro are all examples of the Kremlin’s staged responses. The Pentagon assessed the recent ICBM was a new, experimental type of intermediate range missile and therefore one of a kind. It was an extraordinarily expensive gesture, costing the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars, whose cost effectiveness was zero, and thus does not amount to staggering towards nuclear Armageddon, as misguided doomsayers allege.

And what are we to make of President Emmanuel Macron’s vague remarks of sending Western troops to Ukraine? This story first arrived in February 2024, when Macron was trying to stimulate debate about non-combat personnel deploying in roles such as de-mining, border protection or training Ukrainian forces, almost the sort of functions they would perform in a notional future buffer zone, alongside multinational contractors. They were in line with his reputation as a diplomatic disruptor who likes to break taboos and challenge conventional thinking. In May, the issue arose again, and received harsh pushback from Germany, Italy, and the United States over fears of escalation. In November, after meeting Kier Starmer in Paris on 11 November, the first British premier to attend Armistice Day commemorations in Paris since Winston Churchill, the story aired again in the same way. 

Macron has never talked of sending French, or other troops to Ukraine, but his precise words were that “he wouldn’t rule out” such deployments, which is not the same thing. In toying with the media as he does, Macron seeks to create “strategic ambiguity” in the mind of Russia, though unsurprisingly he was so ambiguous that he sparked confusion and irritation amongst his weaker allies. He understands that Germany’s reaction to Russia has been a huge disappointment. Angela Merkel disliked Putin but refused to act because Russia was a key market for German business. She shut down her nation’s nuclear power industry, but replaced it with dependence on Russian fossil fuel, and sat on her hands doing little or nothing to help the Ukrainian cause even after 2014. Subsequently she refused to rearm, though aware of Putin’s strategic drift, from her fluency in Russian due to her East Germany upbringing. Though her negligence emboldened Putin, her new memoir, Freiheit (Freedom) is a complete denial of any wrongdoing. Her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder is closely associated with Russian energy companies and widely perceived as Putin’s apologist, whilst her successor, Olaf Scholz has continued to struggle with his own anti-NATO beliefs and weaker leadership skills.

Both Putin and Macron, whose France has replaced Germany as the strong man of Europe, realise that what is needed in Europe today is the spirit of 16 October 1941. The day before, Stalin’s armoured train had been readied as he ordered the evacuation of Communist Party leaders, the General Staff and various civil government offices from Moscow to Kuibyshev, to escape the expected arrival of the Wehrmacht. Even Lenin’s coffin, perhaps the most revered icon of the Soviet state, was shunted east. The flight caused panic amongst Muscovites, most of whom expected their city to fall, and two million crammed themselves onto every available train and bus heading out of the capital. Seeing his personal train prepared, with steam up, ready to whisk him to safety, that evening Stalin paced the Kazansky station platform, weighing his options carefully. Realising he and his reputation would not survive absconding in the Motherland’s hour of need, at the last possible moment he cancelled the train and headed back to the Kremlin. For the first time since the Nazi invasion on 22 June, he drove events, rather than reacted to them. It is no exaggeration to say the decision was pivotal to the outcome of the war and led to Germany’s downfall in 1945. To date, only Ukraine’s leader has exhibited a similar resolve, whilst other world leaders have been passengers to events of the new Eastern Front. There is still time to join Volodymyr Zelensky in the driving cab of the Slava Ukraini Express, non-stop to Victory, but the minutes on the station clock are ticking away.