May 8 and the War for History: What the World Refuses to See

As the world pauses each year on May 8 to commemorate the end of World War II in Europe, we are reminded not only of victory, but also of unfinished justice.
For while Nazi Germany was defeated in 1945, its eastern mirror — the Soviet Union — never stood trial. It never repented, never reformed, and never relinquished its grip on power, history, or narrative.

Instead, it built a state religion around the “Great Patriotic War” — an ideology that silenced the facts of:

• the mass executions in Bykivnia,
• the deportation of Crimean Tatars,
• torture chambers in Western Ukraine,
• and the eradication of non-Soviet resistance movements across Eastern Europe.

This mythology allowed the USSR to enter the postwar order as a “liberator” — even as it subjugated half of Europe with tanks, barbed wire, and fear.
Its successor, russia, inherited not only nuclear weapons but also the impunity of a regime that was never judged.

The Myth of Victory — Weaponized

The Nuremberg Trials aimed to define crimes:

• Aggression is criminal.
• Propaganda is warfare.
• The killing of civilians is not a side effect — it is a strategy.

But only half of Europe was freed from tyranny.
The other half — from the Baltic states to Ukraine — remained under a regime that escaped accountability.

If Germany was denazified, Russia was re-KGB’ed.
It gained a veto in the UN Security Council — not by virtue of democratic reform, but through the political inertia of the Cold War.

That mistake would haunt the 21st century.

The War Against Ukraine Is a War for the Past

Russia’s war against Ukraine is not just a land grab — it is a battle to preserve its monopoly on the meaning of “Victory.”

When Ukrainian soldiers push back Russian forces, they also shatter Moscow’s last sacred myth:
That alone defeated fascism.
That alone holds the legacy of World War II.
That it cannot, by definition, be a perpetrator.

This myth justifies:

• the destruction of Grozny,
• the war in Syria,
• the massacres in Bucha, Izium, and Mariupol.

What Russia fears is not just HIMARS.
It fears the loss of its state-sanctioned heroism — and Ukraine is the mirror it cannot face.

2022 Was Not an Outlier — It Was the Pattern

Russia did not attack Ukraine because it felt threatened.
It attacked because it had already gotten away with too much.

• Georgia, 2008: No consequences.
• Crimea, 2014: “Non-recognition,” but no resistance.
• Donbas, Minsk Accords: A “peace process” that ceded influence in exchange for delay.

This is not an escalation.
This is a strategy based on the world’s silence.

The parallels with the 1930s are not accidental:

• “Inviolable borders” were broken with Austria.
• “Security guarantees” dissolved under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
• The League of Nations expelled the USSR only after the invasion of Finland. By then, it was already too late.

The Postwar Order Has No Antivirus

The global security architecture was never designed to deal with a state that inherits impunity as ideology.

• The UN is paralyzed.
• NATO hesitates.
• Countries that sent tanks to liberate Europe in 1944 now debate whether supplying artillery might “provoke.”

Meanwhile, Ukraine fights alone — not only for its sovereignty, but for the soul of Europe.
And much like in 1938, the world waits — not for justice, but for discomfort to pass.

Putin does not threaten the global order.
The global order, as we knew it, no longer exists.

There Is No “After Ukraine”

Ukraine today is 1939 with one crucial difference:
We are not asking the world to fight for us.
We are asking the world not to stop us from fighting.

If London once said, “We are next,”
then Berlin, Paris, and Washington must now understand:

There is no “after Ukraine.”
There is only a shared victory — or a shared collapse.

May 8 Is Not a Ceremony — It’s a Choice

This is not a time for nostalgia.
It is a time to tell the truth:

• The Soviet Union was not a liberator — it was an occupier.
• Ukraine’s resistance is a reckoning with 20th-century lies that were never confronted.
• Putin is not “the new Hitler.” He is the unpunished heir of Stalin — politically, institutionally, and ideologically.

We either say this out loud —
or we let history, once again, rewrite a version of the future where we no longer exist.