June 22, 1941 … 82 years ago. The last time German tanks along with some 3.5 million German and nearly 700,000 German-allied troops invaded the former Soviet Union

It was here at the Seelow Heights just west of the Oder River that the in April, 1945 Soviet troops stormed clearing the path for the Soviet offensive against Berlin and the end of the Nazi regime. Museum at Seelow Heights, visited in April, 1985,

(What follows is Alexander Mercouris’ (the Duran) commentary transcribed below. It says pretty much what is on my mind. On this date With some 3.5 million German and nearly 700,000 German-allied troops – among them Ukrainian Nazi Banderites – invaded the USSR. Four epic battles followed – Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, the storming of Berlin from the Seelow Heights – along with hundreds of “smaller” ones, none of which were very small  – ensued. When it was over, some 27 million Soviets lay dead having born the brunt of the fighting and the defeating of the Nazis along with 8.5 million Germans.)

Alexander Mercouris:

… It is also the anniversary on the 22 of June, 1941 of the German (Nazi) military and of Germany’s allies – and it’s important to say that Germany had a significant number of allies at that time in Europe – against the Soviet Union which initiated the four year war between Germany and the Soviet Union, by far the most titanic, the greatest military struggle in human history and one which in the end after extraordinary violence and suffering led to the final defeat of (Nazi) Germany and the capture of Berlin by the Red Army.

This is of course an enormously important event in Russian history.

The war touched on every Russian (and non-Russian Soviet) family. The Soviet Union suffered 27 million losses – that’s the official number – over the course of the war that is the number of people were killed. Many more were wounded, many more were traumatized as a result of that war. And though of course today’s Russia is not the entirety of the Soviet Union – it is only a part of the Soviet Union – which Germany attacked on the 22nd of June 1941, it is Russia by all accounts absorbed much the greater part of these casualties.

So it is a huge event in Russian history, a tremendously traumatic event for Russians and it’s one that they remember extremely well and to a very great extent still informs their outlook on international relations to an extent that Western rarely ever seem to grasp, partly I suspect because the full extent and horror of the war between the war the Russians had to fight between 1941 and 1945 has never been properly recognized in the West.

Any discussion of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, any attempt to define Russian actions without taking this colossal event in the not so distant past into account is inherently flawed. I’m not saying that the war that began for the Russians on the 22nd of June 1941 provides the entire explanation for the present conflict, but it certainly provides a significant part of that explanation in so far as Russians are concerned in that it is their point of view another conflict involving the West encroaching on historical Russian territories which the Russians perceive themselves as defending.

That may not be an interpretation that many people in the West will accept but it’s not a question of whether the interpretation is one that should be accepted  or not, it is the fact that it is the interpretation that most Russians hold and which affects the way they view this conflict (the Special Military Operation in Ukraine).