Cups depicting Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and Russian President Vladimir Putin are displayed for sale at a souvenir shop in St. Petersburg, Russia, in
2022. The words on the Putin cup reads ‘The most polite man.’
(AP Photo)
Although tempting to make the comparison, Vladimir Putin’s recent military purge doesn’t appear to be a replay of Stalin’s infamous purge in 1937.
EPA-EFE/Christophe Petit Tesson
The 2024 D-day commemorations sent a message of European unity but missed the opportunity to acknowledge Ukraine’s contribution to the defeat of Nazism.
In this photo released by Sputnik news agency on Feb. 9, 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson at the Kremlin in Moscow.
(Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
Why is there such a Russian focus on the Second World War? Because it’s used to justify authoritarian states, the rule of dictators like Putin and Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko.
EPA-EFE/Mikhail Metzel/Kremlin pool/Sputnik
Russia’s casualty count in Ukraine is high, but the country has a national mythology built on loss and sacrifice.
EPA-EFE/Yuri Kochetkov
Interviews with Russian men found most no longer see military service as a marker of masculinity.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, attends a flower-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier close to the Kremlin.
EPA-EFE/Anton Novoderekhkin/Kremlin pool/Sputnik
May 9 this year is “no victory day” as Putin has little to show after 74 days of aggression against Ukraine.
A woman pays homage at the memorial to victims of the 1941 Nazi massacre of Jews in Babi Yar in Kyiv, Ukraine.
AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky
Over two days in September 1941, more than 33,000 Jews were murdered by Nazi forces and their Ukrainian collaborators in Babi Yar.
Women get shut down when bringing up the still-taboo subject of sexual assault.
markgoddard/Getty
A scholar who studies Holocaust survivors sees an explanation for why women change their stories of sexual assault, even now in the
MeToo era.
Israeli families hold pictures of relatives killed in the Soviet Union struggle against the Nazis in WWII, Jerusalem, May 2015.
EPA/Abir Sultan
There’s a widening split over rival interpretations of the end of the second world war and its aftermath.
Soviet troops advancing at Stalingrad.
Wikimedia
Two big battles which turned the tide of World War II can tell us a great deal about some important present-day challenges.