With the start of 2026, various analysts have declared that Russia’s war against Ukraine has exceeded the length of Soviet involvement in World War II. This is wrong on two levels.
First, Russia’s Vladimir Putin launched the war against Ukraine not nearly four years ago, but in 2013-14, when he pressured Ukraine in November 2013 not to sign agreements with the European Union. That triggered protests and the then pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, to flee to Russia in February 2014. Russia at that time illegally moved into Crimea, the peninsula part of Ukraine that juts into the Black Sea, and then moved into the Donbas region. More than 14,000 Ukrainians were killed between February 2014 and February 2022, when Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Second, while the Soviets fought the Nazis for nearly four years, they were collaborators in carving up Europe for nearly two years under the Secret Additional Protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed by the Soviet and Nazi foreign ministers. Less than three weeks after Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the Soviets invaded from the east. This was followed by the Soviet invasion of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Russian revisionists like to claim that World War II started for the Soviet Union when the Nazis invaded in June 1941. That ignores Josef Stalin’s complicity with Adolf Hitler for nearly two years.
Why this matters
This history is important because revisionist myths about World War II are some of the Kremlin’s often-used disinformation tools. By falsely labeling all Ukrainians opposed to the Kremlin as “Nazis,” Putin has justified Russia’s baseless and brutal invasion of Ukraine to the Russian populace as equivalent to Soviet “liberation” of Europe from Nazi rule. Never mind that hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians switched sides and served in General Andrey Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army that fought for the Third Reich. Never mind that after the war, the Soviets forcibly occupied the eastern half of Europe and raised the Iron Curtain. Never mind that the Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989.
This is why Ukraine now celebrates the end of World War II on May 8, aligning with Europe, as opposed to Russia’s “Victory Day” celebrations on May 9 that have come to serve as propaganda tools for Putin’s regime. Also worth noting is the fact that the Ukrainian and Belarussian Soviet Republics of the USSR suffered a higher percentage loss of their respective populations at the time – 16.3% for Ukraine and 25.3% for Belarussians – than did the Russian Republic at 12.7% of its 1940 population. And yet Kremlin propagandists essentially ignore the losses of the other ethnic republics and try to portray the suffering from WWII as a Russian tragedy only.
As George Orwell said: “All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed, they must rely exclusively on force.” Historical memory is a powerful tool of statecraft. Democratic leaders have the responsibility to tell the truth about their nation’s sacrifices but also to acknowledge their nation’s mistakes. For dictators like Putin, on the other hand, history only serves as a tool of propaganda and justification for aggression. We must not be afraid to call it out and correct the record.
