MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 19th June, 2020) The Soviet Union and the Red Army made the crucial contribution to the defeat of Nazism, despite modern attempts to underplay it, Russian President Vladimir Putin said.
"The Soviet Union and the Red Army, no matter what anyone is trying to prove today, made the main and crucial contribution to the defeat of Nazism," Putin said in his article "The Real Lessons of the 75th Anniversary of World War II" published in US magazine National Interest.
"These were heroes who fought to the end surrounded by the enemy at Bialystok and Mogilev, Uman and Kiev, Vyazma and Kharkiv. They launched attacks near Moscow and Stalingrad, Sevastopol and Odessa, Kursk and Smolensk. They liberated Warsaw, Belgrade, Vienna and Prague. They stormed Koenigsberg and Berlin," the Russian president added.
On the whole, the Soviet Union accounted for about 75 percent of all military efforts undertaken by the anti-Hitler coalition, Putin stressed.
"Let me cite you another document. This is a report of February 1954 on reparation from Germany by the Allied Commission on Reparations headed by Ivan Maisky. The Commission's task was to define a formula according to which defeated Germany would have to pay for the damages sustained by the victor powers. The Commission concluded that 'the number of soldier-days spent by Germany on the Soviet front is at least 10 times higher than on all other allied fronts. The Soviet front also had to handle four-fifths of German tanks and about two-thirds of German aircraft,'" Putin said.
During the war period, the Red Army "ground up" 626 divisions of the Axis states, of which 508 were German, he said.
The Soviet Union also suffered the hardest losses in that war, Putin recalled.
"Almost 27 million Soviet citizens lost their lives on the fronts, in German prisons, starved to death and were bombed, died in ghettos and furnaces of the Nazi death camps. The USSR lost one in seven of its citizens, the UK lost one in 127, and the USA lost one in 320. Unfortunately, this figure of the Soviet Union's hardest and grievous losses is not exhaustive," he said.
